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In something of a surprise to a world that’s seen a lot of autocrats getting away with a lot of human rights abuses recently, former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by Philippine National Police in Manila today on a warrant from the International Criminal Court, and is on his way to the Netherlands, where he’ll be tried for crimes against humanity in The Hague.
He’ll finally face international justice for his bloody policy of extrajudicial killings of thousands of people suspected of selling or using drugs, or of being in the same place as drug users; such fine distinctions didn’t much matter to his militarized police, which is perhaps too grand a name for the thugs working for him. The ICC investigation covers Duterte’s time as mayor of Davao, in the southern Philippines, as well as his tenure as president. The estimates of those killings range from a minimum of 6,000 that were acknowledged by the national police, to as many as 30,000, as claimed by human rights groups.
In yet another reminder of how weird the planet is these days, the arrest was announced by President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, son of the nation’s longtime president (1965-1986), who ran his own abusive dictatorship under martial law from 1972 to 1981 before being ousted by a massive prodemocracy movement.
Autocracies don’t last forever. But it’s best not to let them come to power in the first place.
Donald Trump has long admired Duterte for being exactly the kind of strongman he’d like to be himself. He really thought it was neat that Duterte had thousands of people killed without a bunch of rights getting in the way, because after all they were all criminals, according to those who killed them.
A brief addendum to Maya Angelou’s famous warning: When people show you who they admire and want to be like, believe them the first time.
The Associated Press, which saw the ICC warrant, reports that it said
“there are reasonable grounds to believe that” the attack on victims “was both widespread and systematic: the attack took place over a period of several years and thousands people appear to have been killed.”
Duterte’s arrest was necessary “to ensure his appearance before the court,” the March 7 warrant said. “Mindful of the resultant risk of interference with the investigations and the security of witnesses and victims, the chamber is satisfied that the arrest of Mr. Duterte is necessary.”
In a brief statement after the plane had taken off, the ICC confirmed that one of its pre-trial chambers had issued an arrest warrant for Duterte on charges of “murder as a crime against humanity allegedly committed in the Philippines between Nov. 1, 2011, and March 16, 2019.”
Good. And for an international court, relatively quick after his departure from office, though for the victims, also long overdue.
Families of those killed by Duterte and his goons rallied in Manila.
“This is a big, long-awaited day for justice,” Randy delos Santos told the AP. His teenage nephew was gunned down by police in a dark riverside alley during an anti-drug operation in suburban Caloocan city in August 2017.
Delos Santos added that it’s time for top police officials and officers who participated in the murders to be brought to justice as well. So far, only three criminal convictions have followed the years of thousands of killings. Three police officers were convicted in 2018 for the murder of delos Santos’s nephew, which briefly slowed Duterte’s killing spree.
If you can stomach it, today would be a good day to reread the 2016 New York Times story on Duterte’s crimes, which received a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. We would provide a gift link but that doesn’t appear to be an option on that old story; here’s an archive link that appears to have all of it.
The ICC has been investigating Duterte’s reign of terror going back to 2011, when he was still mayor of Davao. Before Duterte’s term as president expired, he withdrew the Philippines from the Rome Statute, the international treaty establishing the ICC, in an obvious attempt to avoid accountability. The ICC went ahead with the investigations and brought charges anyway because even though Marcos didn’t rejoin the treaty, the ICC can
step in when countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute suspects in the most serious crimes, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It’s a high standard to meet, and it’s worth noting here that while Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute, he never sent it to the Senate for a ratification vote, largely because Republicans (and some Democrats too) would have rejected it. The “respectable” reason was that US citizens can supposedly only be tried under the Constitution, not international bodies. The less-respectable reason, though it was often said out loud anyway, was rooted in fear that poor innocent US soldiers in a conflict where we’re making people accept democracy might get scooped up on bogus charges by some third-world country that hates us. So we must remain free from any outside interference when we’re dealing with those terrible countries.
Because the bar for prosecution of non-signatories of the Rome Statute is so high, it’s fairly unlikely that Donald Trump will ever garner an ICC warrant, unless his most bloodthirsty fantasies — like a drug policy based on Duterte’s, or some shootings of protesters — are actually realized. And hey, if he orders some extrajudicial killings as an official act, our own Supreme Court has already made clear he can walk.
Best to make sure he never drags this country that far into the nightmare scenario before it’s realized, we’d say.
OPEN THREAD.
[AP / NYT (2016) / Archived version of 2016 NYT story]
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