BIOGRAPHY

She was born on June 15, 1945, in the city of Iloilo. Miriam Defensor Santiago   

(Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago)   

Miriam learned to take charge early in life. As a precocious child and the eldest of seven, she was running the household well before she was out of grade school. Her mother was a career woman who eschewed housework, so responsibility for the daily marketing, for supervising the family's untrained village maids, and for organizing her younger brothers and sisters to do their chores devolved upon her.Miriam Palma Defensor Santiago was a Filipino academic, lawyer judge, author, and statesman, who served in all three branches of the Philippine government: judicial, executive, and legislative. She was a long-serving Senator of the Republic of the Philippines. 

In 1988, Defensor Santiago was named laureate of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for government service, with a citation for bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a graft-ridden government agency. She ran in the 1992 presidential elections but was controversially defeated. In 2012, Defensor Santiago became the first Filipina and the Asian from a developing country to be elected a judge of the International Criminal Court. She later resigned the post, citing chronic fatigue syndrome, which turned out to be lung cancer . In 2016, she became part of the International Advisory Council of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), an intergovernmental body that promotes the rule of law.

Defensor Santiago served three in the Philippine Senate. On 13 October 2015. Defensor Santiago declared her candidacy for president of the Philippines in the 2016 election after her doctors from the United States declared her cancer ' stable ' and ' receded ', but lost in the election. In December 2018, the prestigious Quezon Service Cross was posthumously conferred upon Santiago, waking her the first and only woman and the sixth person since 1946 to be enthroned in the country' s highest roster. Defensor Santiago was known as the Dragon Lady, the Platinum Lady, the Incorruptible Lady, the Tiger Lady, and most popular, the Iron Lady of Asia. She is Colloquially known in Philippine pop culture as simply Miriam or MDS.