The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) will be under the new leadership of Chair Leah Tanodra-Armamento after her appointment was released on Wednesday, 16 February 2022. Chair Tanodra-Armamento will be succeeding the late Chair Jose Luis Martin ‘Chito’ Gascon.

The new CHR Chair is not new to the Commission. Chair Tanodra-Armamento was previously a Commissioner under the present and Fifth Commission en banc.

Prior to CHR, Chair Tanodra-Armamento worked for five years with the Office of the Solicitor General as an Associate Solicitor, where she assisted the solicitors in habeas corpus cases. She transferred to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and moved her way up from State Prosecutor to Senior State Prosecutor from 1991 to 2003. In 2003, Chair Tanodra-Armamento was appointed as the DOJ Assistant Chief State Prosecutor, where she chaired the legal panel of the Government of the Philippines (GPH) during the 1996 Review of the Final Peace Agreement’s Implementation between GPH and Moro National Liberation Front (MILF). Thereafter, she was appointed as DOJ Undersecretary.

Chair Tanodra-Armamento graduated Bachelor of Laws from the Ateneo De Manila University School of Law. She was also a fellow of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2007.

The new Chair will be serving the unexpired term of the previous CHR Chair. Chair Gascon passed on after succumbing to complications caused by Covid-19 in October 2021.

The appointments of the present Commission en banc—namely, Commissioner Karen Gomez-Dumpit, Commissioner Gwendolyn Pimentel-Gana, and Commissioner Roberto Eugenio Cadiz—will expire on 5 May 2022.