EDITORIAL - The road to the ICC

The protection being pushed by senators against the possible arrest of their colleagues for crimes against humanity provides yet another argument for why the International Criminal Court has found it necessary to step in.

Several senators want any arrest order coursed through a local court before anyone is handed over to the International Criminal Police Organization.

If this happens, a final, enforceable court order allowing the turnover of any senator to the Interpol and thence to the ICC will likely be obtained only after the senators’ terms are over. It’s not even farfetched to expect a final court ruling to be issued years after the ICC has already ruled on the case against former president Rodrigo Duterte. And even then, the turnover could still be derailed by a temporary restraining order issued by a local court.

Despite being detained at the Scheveningen Prison in The Hague, Duterte was still allowed to run for mayor of his home city of Davao last year, and he won overwhelmingly. His eldest son is the city’s congressman; his second son, who won as vice mayor, has since been sworn in as mayor; his grandson Rodrigo II, who garnered the highest vote as city councilor, is now the vice mayor.

With that stranglehold on power in the city, justice is just a pipe dream for relatives of alleged victims of extrajudicial killings by the so-called Davao death squads when Rodrigo Duterte was city mayor.

In 2022, his daughter Sara won the vice presidency by a landslide, in tandem with Ferdinand Marcos Jr. No effort was made to investigate the killings in Duterte’s brutal anti-drug campaign as possible crimes against humanity. This was despite the existence of Republic Act 9851, the law passed in 2009 covering crimes against international humanitarian law, genocide and other crimes against humanity.

Instead, in the early years of the Marcos administration, there was a perfunctory effort to investigate about 60 allegations of EJKs, but as separate, individual cases of murder rather than part of the offenses covered under RA 9851. Even this effort, however, didn’t get very far.

Last week, Duterte’s daughter formally announced her bid for the presidency in 2028. If she wins, relatives of EJK victims and survivors of the bloody crackdown can kiss any hope of justice goodbye.

The failure of the Philippine judicial system, supported by the political environment now on display at the Senate, brought Rodrigo Duterte to The Hague.