Press Release
March 22, 2011

Senate commends Santiago for bagging two awards

The Senate adopted a resolution today commending Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago for being one of the recipients of the Womanity Award of the Female Network.com and for being listed in Google's Top 20 Most Influential Filipinas of 2010.

"The website Female Network.com, which records an average of four million to five million page views per day and the globally famous search engine, Google.com, released the list of the Ten Womanity Awardees and the Top Twenty Most Influential Filipinas of 2010, respectively, citing Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago as one of the awardees. We congratulate her," Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, who authored Resolution 437, said.

According to Estrada, it was not the first time Santiago had received awards recognizing her for her fight against corruption. In 1988, he said, Santiago was named Laureate of the Asian Nobel Prize, known as the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service where she was cited for her bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a graft-ridden government agency.

Estrada said that when she was appointed Regional Trial Court judge in 1993, Santiago received judicial excellence from civic groups, notably as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Professionals of the Philippine Jaycees and the Ten Outstanding Women in the Nation's Service of the Philippine Lions.

"Being an exemplary and distinguish public servant, Santiago became the darling of the press, both nationally and internationally. She was featured by TIME, the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, and International Herald Tribune, among others. She was pictured as incorruptible lady, the iron lady of Asia, the dragon lady, the platinum lady and the undisputed campus heroine," Estrada said. A graduate of the Philippine University of Law, Santiago pursued her post doctoral studies in law at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford, University of California, at Berkeley and Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She likewise attended the Hague Academy of Public International Law at the Hague, Netherlands and at the Sophia University in Tokyo. Santiago served as a lawyer, trial court judge, immigration commissioner and agrarian reform secretary before becoming senator.

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