16 hours ago
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After his arrest on an international criminal court (ICC) warrant on Tuesday, the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, demonstrated an uncharacteristic concern for due legal process. A petition was unsuccessfully filed to his country’s supreme court to stay his extradition, as lawyers challenged the ICC’s jurisdiction, and pleas were made for any trial to take place in a Philippine court.
The relatives of those butchered during Mr Duterte’s brutal and lawless “war on drugs” will struggle to sympathise. Notoriously, many of its victims never got near a courtroom of any description. In 2016, months into a presidency in which thousands of Filipinos suffered summary executions, Mr Duterte readily acknowledged an indiscriminate dimension to the lawless carnage he had unleashed. The deaths of innocents and children, he told reporters, amounted to inevitable “collateral damage” in his mission to clean up the streets.
Given a green light from the top, vigilante gangs and hired hitmen turned the poorer parts of Manila and his home city of Davao into killing zones. Corrupt police were allegedly financially incentivised to shoot suspects rather than arrest them. Only a handful of officers were ever convicted of a crime. Testifying to the Philippine senate last October, the former president offered “no apologies, no excuses” for this reign of terror, during which foreign criticism was dismissed with swaggering contempt and internal opponents threatened and imprisoned.
The ICC was expressly established as a tribunal of last resort to deal with such catastrophic abuses of power, especially in cases where leaders appeared to enjoy domestic impunity. Enforcing its writ has been a slow, seldom straightforward and frequently unsuccessful process. The arrest of Mr Duterte at Manila airport, on a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity between 2016 and 2019, is therefore a moment of signal importance.
For thousands of Filipino families, Mr Duterte’s extradition to the Netherlands at last offers the possibility of accountability and a reckoning. The vast majority of the victims of the “war on drugs” were poor, urban males whose relatives lacked the resources to fight for justice on their behalf. Until recently, a political understanding with the current president, Ferdinand R Marcos Jr – and the election of Mr Duterte’s daughter, Sara, as vice‑president – appeared to have ensured his immunity from prosecution. It took a falling out between the country’s two most powerful clans to give the ICC judges their opportunity, and bereaved relatives their chance of closure.
Mr Duterte’s savage brand of authoritarianism was popular among a majority of voters, and the evidence and testimony to be heard at The Hague may make for uncomfortable hearing. Still an influential political figure, until Tuesday the former president planned to run once again to become mayor in Davao.
Instead he finds himself the central figure in proceedings which are a vindication of the patient, dogged persistence of ICC investigators. At a time when the notion of a rules-based world order is being treated with routine disdain in Washington as well as Moscow, Mr Duterte’s arrest on Philippine soil sends a salutary warning to would-be strongmen around the world: investigations launched in The Hague carry a greater threat than mere reputational damage to rogue leaders.
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