After years of efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC), former President Rodrigo Duterte was finally arrested by the Philippine National Police and transferred to The Hague. What at first glance appears to be positive news, on the other hand, demonstrates the lack of will and abject failure of Philippine politics and authorities to prosecute the former president on their own soil. While the arrest is a first step to accountability and justice, it is also a dramatic testimony to the continued existence of a political elite that has no interest in taking responsibility for the common good themselves.
Duterte’s Extradition: A Strategic Dodge of National Accountability
The decision to arrest and extradite the former president is explained and justified by the current President Ferdinand Marcos by the Philippines‘ international treaty obligations to Interpol: “Interpol asked for help and we obliged, because we have commitments to the Interpol which we have to fulfill. […] We did not do this because it […] came from the ICC. We did this because Interpol asked us to do it. […] This is the evolution of his case and this is where we end up.” This is in line with the previous stance that the Philippines does not cooperate with the ICC but responds to international treaty obligations as a responsible nation. At the same time, it signals that with this final act, the case is deemed closed for the Philippines.
This is bad news, as it shifts all responsibility for future developments to the ICC, allowing national institutions responsible for the prosecution and adjudication of crimes to sit back and do nothing. It also puts an end to the continued demands for a strong stance of the legislature, which opened serious investigations only recently, namely in August 2024, more than two years after the former president was replaced by his successor. The investigations concluded with a preliminary report that, while recommending to charge the president, remained secret.
Put simply, the recent decisions we have witnessed in the past months and days would with all probability not have been taken, had there not been a serious fallout between the current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his predecessor and their families dating back to late 2023. As long as both families cooperated for the sake of power, there were no signs of an attempt to process the events of the drug war. To this day, these attempts remain limited to the legislature, while the judiciary remains inactive, and the current president refuses to make a concrete statement on the massive allegations in order not to alienate the many Filipinos who for the six years of the Duterte presidency had clearly been in favor of the war on drugs.
The current decision, which will most likely be followed by a lengthy court trial, allows Philippine institutions and politicians, much like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to wash their hands of any responsibility for all future developments. In doing so, they aim to minimize the potentially massive political repercussions that an indictment and trial in Philippine courts would likely entail. With only the former president being indicted, the legislative and judicial control institutions can continue concealing their lack of civic courage and their failure during and after his presidency, while remaining under the radar of public criticism for their passive stance, if not outright support, for the war on drugs. In the case of Rodrigo Duterte, both the legislature and the judiciary remained silent for the whole period of his presidency and for most of the years since.
From Silent Enablers to Belated Investigators: Philippine Legislature’s About-Face
During Rodrigo Duterte’s term as president, the legislative branch remained silent on the killings. While in August 2016 one senator, Leila De Lima, managed to establish a Senate investigation into extrajudicial killings during Duterte’s time as mayor of Davao City and as president, her efforts were cut short by her colleagues’ decision to remove her from the chairmanship of the senate committee on justice and human rights. The final 2016 report on the inquiry then found no “proof that there is state sponsored policy to commit killings to eradicate illegal drugs in the country.” At the same time it acknowledged the undeniable fact of mass killings, but normalized it as a practice that extends to the past decades, as they note “many thousands of killings with impunity taking place every year in the last two decades at least.” This assessment was repeated in February 2017, when they noted that there “is not proof that there is a State-sponsored policy to commit killings to eradicate illegal drugs in the country” shifting responsibility for the killings to “rogue uniformed personnel.” While one may argue that there was no “proof” of state organized systematic killings, there was already strong evidence that should have warranted a request to the state prosecution to file a case. Instead, the senate committee opted to whitewash the president and his administration and put the blame on low-ranking police operatives.
The House of Representatives failed completely to tackle the killings in any of its committees. Efforts at impeachment were not forthcoming, even though the constitution would provide a basis in the oath of the president that obliges the president to “preserve and defend its {the Philippine’s] Constitution, execute its laws, do justice to every man.” This and the constitutional obligation that “no person shall be deprived of life […] without due process of law” (Article 3, Sect. 1) would have provided sufficient grounds for an impeachment given the president’s open advocacy for the mass-killing of drug suspects – “Hitler massacred three million Jews … there’s three million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them,” – and his admittance to having personally killed suspects during his time as mayor of Davao City: “I’d go around in Davao with a motorcycle, with a big bike around, and I would just patrol the streets, looking for trouble also. I was really looking for a confrontation so I could kill.”
Since President Duterte left office, two full years passed without the legislature turning actively to the issue of mass killings by law enforcement personnel. While in late 2023 the legislature had already signaled its support for a cooperation with the ICC in two resolutions, it was not before August 2024 that a super-committee composed of four standing committees of the House of Representatives (Quadcom) was assembled to deal with the egregious legacy of the Duterte years. The Quadcom’s work unearthed significant new evidence, especially from police officers, who related at least a small part of the systemic dynamics driving the war on drugs. However, as soon as the report was finalized, the committee head Ace Barbers made sure to point out that it would not be shared with the ICC, but only with domestic agencies, most prominently the Department of Justice.
This activism, however, emerged in the context of two key political triggers. On the one hand, it was established to make the ICC investigation seem superfluous. On the other hand, it occurred after a significant rift developed between the current president and his predecessor, to the point where criticizing the former president aligned with the current president’s interests and preferences. The paradoxes of the current Quadcom’s work are epitomized in its Chair, Robert “Ace” Barbers, who as head of the Committee on Dangerous Drugs) also heads the Quadcom. Barbers, currently presents himself as an exemplary enlightener and champion for justice, driven by a “solemn commitment to uncovering the truth, upholding justice and crafting meaningful legislative solutions to address the scourges of illegal drug proliferation […] and extrajudicial killings. […] The most chilling revelations pertains to the extrajudicial that have scared our nation’s history. The investigations brought to light a harrowing of abuse of power and institutional impunity during the Duterte administration.” However, Barbers, a long-standing ally of Rodrigo Duterte and outspoken proponent of his drug war, holds his position as chair of the House Committee on Dangerous Drugs since his first election to congress in 2016, the very elections that brought Rodrigo Duterte to the Presidency. Thus, like the majority of current members of the Committee on Dangerous Drugs (17 of 32), he was a member of the House of Representatives during the high tide of the war on drugs, and like everyone else he was part of the majority coalition supporting the president. In mid-2017 he presented the war on drugs as a model for ASEAN and noted: “Of course there are killings there, the human rights violations [are] definitely not coming from a direct order coming from the President […] You know, the enemy here is not an ordinary enemy. They will kill you. They are more aggressive than any law enforcement agency in the country. So we have to fight them head-on.”
Therefore, the recent legislative shift can be attributed to political expediency and opportunism among members of congress who are sponsoring bills lavishing praise on the current president “for his leadership and sincere commitment to steer the country toward a ‘Bagong Pilipinas’ (New Philippines).”
Judicial Inertia: A Systemic Failure in Philippine Justice
The judiciary likewise failed to offer resistance, even when they would have had the opportunity to do so. This practice of turning a blind eye to human rights violations and avoiding conflicts starts at the lowest levels of the police’s internal control system, the Internal Affairs Service, that did not file a single case against an officer in an officer-involved shooting, and continues to the national prosecution service that in the same vein filed only a handful of cases where it had political clearance to do so. Both continued to operate under the assumption of regularity in police operations, ignoring the fundamental shift in numbers of suspects purportedly killed in armed encounters. Overall, the same holds true for the Supreme Court that preempted Congress in its attempt to remove the Duterte critical chief justice via impeachment, when the Court reacted to a quo warranto petition filed by the Solicitor General, and declared the Chief Justice’s appointment as null and void. It also sided with the government in the constructed case against the chief Duterte critique in the Senate, Leila De Lima, who spent seven years as remand prisoner based on drug trade charges brought by incarcerated high-ranking leaders of drug syndicates. All of these chargers were later retracted, when the Duterte administration was out of office. While the Supreme Court ordered the release of government records of drug-related killings, after receiving them, it failed to act. The court did also not act on “petitions questioning the legality of the government’s withdrawal from the International Criminal Court,” allowing the withdrawal to take effect.
Crucially, the legislature and judiciary remained inactive also in the years after Duterte had handed the presidential office to his successor Ferdinand Marcos.
While the legislature has started to move due to considerations of political expediency, the state prosecution service remains at a standstill. In 2022, the solicitor general advised the ICC to wait for the results of the Philippine’s own investigations, even though there were no indications of any investigations on the side of the Philippine prosecution. Accordingly, after reviewing material submitted by the Philippines, the ICC ruled to resume the investigation due to insufficient domestic investigative efforts. Two years later, on February 2025, the solicitor general not only repeated this statement, but even demanded that the ICC support the Philippines investigations while at the same time defying cooperation with the ICC: “If you want to help, you should be the one to support the investigation being conducted by the Philippine government, we are not the ones who should help you.”
A Hollow Victory: Philippine Institutions Dodge Responsibility
While the arrest and transfer of the former president to the ICC is good news, demonstrating that even top politicians can be held accountable for their actions, the development simultaneously reveals that the Philippine political elite, as well as national state institutions, continue to evade their responsibilities and are primarily focused on returning to politics as usual.
