Amanda ECHANIS

Image Credit: Amanda Echanis Movement

A poet, writer and activist, Amanda Echanis was acquitted, on 27 December 2025, by a court in Tuguegarao City of a charge of illegal possession of firearms, ammunition and explosives and released after over five years of pre-trial detention. The court found that the prosecution had failed to establish the essential elements of the offence. She had been arrested at her home on 2 December 2020 while caring for her then one-month-old child. The charge is routinely used against those who have been ‘red-tagged’, or publicly accused by government authorities or their proxies of links to communist insurgency groups. Echanis rejected the allegations and accused Philippine authorities of planting evidence. Her detention was marked by repeated postponements of court hearings, resulting in years of unjustified pre-trial imprisonment (see Case List 2025). 

Echanis’ case reflects a deeply personal history of injustice. In 1990, when she was less than two years old, she was held with her parents in custodial detention after her father, also an activist for rural workers’ rights, was arrested on the same charge later brought against her. That case was dismissed in 1992. In August 2020, just months before her arrest, her father was brutally murdered in a case that remains unsolved. 

Amanda Echanis continued to write from behind bars. In 2023, she published a collection of poetry and essays written in detention, Binhi ng Paglaya (Seeds of Liberation). She was also awarded the 2023 Southeast Asian Translation Mentorship, established by The Seams in conjunction with Ethos Books, which is supporting Echanis’ translation of Filipino poetry. In June 2024, she participated in the Palihang Rogelio Sicat creative writing workshop. In 2025, she became the first political prisoner elected to the University of the Philippines Diliman Student Council. 

Image Credit: Free Amanda Echanis Movement