United Nations (UN) experts called for the release of detained former senator Leila de Lima while also expressing “grave disappointment” after a court denied her petition for bail and stretched her six-year detention. In a statement on Friday, June 16, the UN experts also called on the Marcos administration to put an end to the former lawmaker’s case. “We have long called for the immediate release of Leila de Lima,” the experts said. “The decision to deny bail comes after more than six years of arbitrary detention. It is high time for the administration of President Marcos Jr. to close this case once and for all, provide compensation and other reparations, and investigate the circumstances that allowed this to happen in the first place,” they added. Early this month, the Muntinlupa regional trial court denied De Lima’s petition for bail in connection to the remaining drug charge wherein Bilibid convicts accused her of running the illegal drug trade in the New Bilibid Prison. Her two other drug charges were already dismissed, and her camp has filed a motion for consideration regarding her bail earlier this week. A former chairperson of the National Commission on Human Rights and Secretary of Justice, De Lima had been in detention since 2017. Human rights experts and political allies claim the drug charges against her were politically motivated and orchestrated by former president Rodrigo Duterte since she was a staunch critic of the former chief executive since his time as Davao City mayor. Previously, UN experts welcomed the former senator’s acquittal from the two other drug charges against her. The statement quoted a 2018 opinion by the UN Working Group that found De Lima’s detention as a result of her “exercise of the right to political participation, freedom of opinion and expression, thought and conscience, and was imposed through a process that did not respect the basic guarantees of a fair trial.”