The Philippines' Court of Appeals has ordered the country's corporate regulator to restore the media license for news site Rappler, the company announced on social media on Friday.

"Rappler has won its biggest case as a company, as the Court of Appeals has voided the 2018 shutdown order of the Duterte-time Securities and Exchange Commission," they wrote on X, formerly Twitter, referencing the country's former President Rodrigo Duterte.

The site earned Duterte's ire for documenting abuses of power and extrajudicial killings during the former leader's infamous war on drugs.

The 2018 ruling and a 2022 decision upholding the original verdict, found that Rappler had violated rules about foreign ownership of media companies.

At the time, Rappler founder and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa accused the government of "intimidation tactics" against critical voices and violating press freedom.

'No place in a democratic state'

In the decision dated July 23, the Court of Appeals wrote that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed "willful defiance" of the constitution.

Such a move has "no place in a democratic state," Rappler reported the court as saying.

"The facts show that Rappler Holdings, and by extension Rappler, are currently wholly owned and managed by Filipinos, in compliance with the Constitutional mandate," the court stated.

Ressa, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 alongside Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, has also appealed her 2020 conviction in a cyber libel case. She is currently free on bail.

In an interview with DW last September, Ressa said there had been an "improvement" in press freedoms under Duterte's successor Ferdinand Marcos Junior — and his Vice President Sara Duterte, daughter of the former president.

However, she also made clear that journalists were still being held in prison, so there was "still a lot to be done."

es/ab (Reuters, AFP)