Former Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte was flown to The Hague late yesterday, following his arrest at the request of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is investigating his deadly “war on drugs” campaign.
The 79-year-old was arrested yesterday morning at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport after returning from Hong Kong, where he was campaigning among the city’s large Filipino migrant population. The arrest was made on the basis of an ICC warrant issued on March 7.
Duterte was taken to the nearby Villamor Air Base, where at approximately 11 p.m. last night he was placed aboard a Gulfstream G550 jet and flown to the Netherlands, via Dubai. At a press conference yesterday, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. confirmed that Duterte had been flown out of the country and would be transferred to the custody of the ICC.
“The plane is en route to The Hague, in the Netherlands, allowing the former president to face charges of crimes against humanity in relation to his bloody war on drugs,” Marcos said, Al Jazeera reported. “Mr. Duterte was arrested in compliance with our commitments to Interpol,” he added. “Interpol asked for help and we obliged because we have commitments to the Interpol, which we have to fulfill.”
Duterte’s anti-narcotics campaign, modelled on a similar campaign that he launched while mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines, involved the use of extreme force to tackle the scourge of illegal drugs. During Duterte’s six-year presidency, thousands of people – independent estimates range from 12,000 to as many as 30,000 – were killed in extrajudicial “encounters” with police. Most of these were drug users, but the victims of the drug war also included children and other innocents who were caught in the crossfire.
ICC prosecutors began investigating drug war killings in 2019, prompting Duterte to withdraw the Philippines from the court. ICC judges authorized a formal investigation in 2021, covering killings that took place between July 1, 2016, when Duterte came to office, and March 16, 2019, when Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the ICC. The probe also covers extrajudicial killings allegedly committed during Duterte’s time as mayor of Davao City between November 2011 and June 2016.
Until recently, neither the Duterte nor the Marcos administrations cooperated with the ICC investigation. All of this has changed over the past year, however, as the political feud between the Duterte and Marcos clans reached new heights of bile and hostility, shifting President Marcos’ attitude toward the ICC investigation.
Duterte’s rapid transfer to The Hague took place despite desperate efforts by Duterte and his allies to keep him on Philippine soil. Hours after the ex-leader’s arrest, Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, a former chief of the Philippine National Police, played an important role in the “war on drugs,” filed a petition with the Supreme Court. This sought a temporary restraining in order to prevent the government from “facilitating, assisting, or cooperating” with the ICC.
This legal effort smacked of desperation, in light of the fact that the Supreme Court had already ruled in 2021 that the ICC had the right to prosecute “government actors” for alleged crimes committed before the country withdrew from the tribunal in 2019.
In any event, the extradition circumvented this petition and the broader risk that his supporters would mobilize a legal campaign to prevent the former leader from being handed over to the ICC. While legal challenges of various sorts will likely still be filed, the fact that Duterte is now in the ICC’s custody has created a fait accompli that will leave his supporters with little effective recourse, bar taking to the streets. However, the ICC issue is set to play an important role at the midterm elections scheduled for May 12, which were already shaping up as a proxy showdown between the Marcos and Duterte camps.
Human rights groups have hailed the arrest as “a critical step for accountability in the Philippines.” Duterte’s arrest and transfer is also a milestone for the ICC, an institution that has often been accused of focusing its efforts on the leaders of weak African nations. Duterte is now in line to be the first Asian leader tried at the ICC, a fact that will go some way to bolstering the ICC’s claim that it shows neither fear nor favor in terms of what cases it chooses to pursue.
Wider claims about the advance of international justice deserve a degree more skepticism. Duterte’s arrest is both an important step forward for justice and a belated recognition of the suffering of the drug war’s thousands of victims, but it was far from foreordained. On the contrary, it relied on a great deal of luck and happenstance and a highly anomalous domestic political realignment that has pitted former allies against one another.
Just two years ago, Marcos formally requested that the ICC drop its investigation into the drug war, and said that the court had no jurisdiction over the Philippines. There is no reason to think that his position would have changed were it not for the steep deterioration in relations between the Marcos and Duterte families.
Such political contingencies should not detract from the significance of Duterte’s detention – but they do suggest some caution in proclaiming a new era of accountability for Southeast Asia, let alone the world.