Indonesia sentenced her to death. The region now calls her a trafficking victim.

Mary Jane Veloso was arrested in Indonesia in 2010 with 2.6 kg of heroin in her luggage. She said recruiters had promised her a job abroad and handed her the bag. An Indonesian court sentenced her to death for trafficking. She came close to a firing squad in 2015, until Joko Widodo granted a late reprieve after police in the Philippines arrested the people she named as her recruiters. Prabowo Subianto's government agreed in 2024 to send her home, and on 24 September this year President Ferdinand Marcos Jr pardoned her, ending 16 years in detention. Writing for Fulcrum, the commentary site of Singapore's ISEAS institute, Aaron Abel Mallari of the University of the Philippines Diliman draws one lesson from it: she was treated as a criminal first and recognised as a victim long afterwards.

Mallari calls this the "victim-offender overlap": the person a trafficking ring uses is also the person the law punishes, because they are the one holding the drugs. He argues the pattern is spreading in Southeast Asia, above all through the online scam compounds, where people answer a job advert and end up committing the crime themselves. Her case also turned on politics more than law. Benigno Aquino III pressed hard for clemency, and that mattered in 2015 because Philippine prosecutors needed her evidence against her recruiters. Rodrigo Duterte took the opposite line, and reportedly told Widodo in 2016 to "follow your own laws". Whether she counted as a victim or an offender shifted with who was president in Manila.

ASEAN has since written rules it did not have. In 2025 it agreed a guideline on the "non-punishment principle", the idea that a trafficked person should not be punished for crimes their traffickers forced on them, and in 2026 it added indicators for spotting trafficking into forced criminality. Indonesia helped: its representative on the bloc's human rights commission co-hosted the August 2026 workshop that tested them. None of this works until police, prosecutors and judges in each country use it, and Mallari looks to the crime ministers who met in Manila from 19 to 21 October and the ASEAN summit in November.

Why it matters

For an Indonesian taking a job offer abroad, this gap decides whether you end up a witness or a defendant: carry something for someone, and the court in front of you chooses which one you are. Indonesia's drug laws are hard on couriers, so the test here is whether prosecutors start asking who recruited the person in the dock. Veloso needed three Philippine presidents and 16 years. The next person will not get that much attention.