MANILA, Philippines, Aug 31, (AP): A Filipino priest, who publicly protested against then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody crackdown against illegal drugs despite death threats and helped provide proper funerals to slain suspects, is among the winners of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Awards - Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.

The other winners announced on Sunday were a non-profit foundation in India that worked to bring poor girls to schools in more than 30,000 villages across the South Asian country’s most underserved regions and a local Maldives diver who sparked a movement to save her tropical island nation from plastic pollution with massive cleanups and recycling.

Named after a popular Philippine president, who died in a 1957 plane crash, they honor "greatness of spirit” through selfless service to people across Asia. The winners will be presented with their awards at the Metropolitan Theatre in Manila on Nov. 7. The priest is a self-confessed drug user who recovered from addiction and was ordained a Catholic priest in 2006.

He uses his transformation "to prove that even the most wayward and destitute can find redemption and renewal.” In 2015,  Flavie Villanueva founded the Arnold Janssen Kalinga Center, which provides food, clothing and shelter to thousands in need in the Philippines, including those who may have engaged in drugs and petty crimes, so they may reclaim self-respect, according to the award foundation.

Duterte’s police-enforced crackdowns on illegal drugs left thousands of mostly poor suspects killed. The reformed priest led efforts to locate their bodies and raised funds for proper cremation and burial. He also put up a memorial shrine for them to ease the plight of widows and orphans. However, his activism led to accusations of sedition under Duterte, a charge that was dropped in 2023, "although the death threats never stopped,” the foundation said. "

With deep compassion and quiet defiance, he created spaces to rebuild what were unjustly erased by healing the broken, leading home the abandoned and rekindling hope when it seemed all but lost,” the foundation said. Duterte’s stormy six-year presidency ended in 2022. In March this year, the former president was arrested on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for an alleged crime against humanity over the widespread killings of drug suspects. He has denied authorizing extra-judicial killings.