Duterte’s ICC kidnapping with Marcos’ help could be the start of BBM’s fall
No Philippine judge ordered the ‘arrest’
FORMER President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ most loved president whose massive political support continues today, was kidnapped yesterday by the Philippine National Police (PNP), purportedly implementing an arrest order of the controversial International Criminal Court.
I call it a kidnapping as the PNP did not have a warrant of arrest against the former president. It cited however the ICC’s order, which however has no authority nor enforcement arm to arrest anybody, much less a national in his own country. It was clearly the Marcos Jr. government which kidnapped Duterte to be brought to the Hague. It was the PNP which physically brought him out of the airport and brought him together with his family to Villamor Air Base, which is a facility of the Philippine Air Force (PAF).
The PNP kidnapping is a gross violation of the Constitution’s Section 2, Article III — Right Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures, which specifies “that no warrant of arrest shall be issued except upon probable cause to be determined personally by the judge after examination under oath or affirmation of the complainant and the witnesses he may produce.” By judge here, the Constitution means a Philippine judge, not a so-called “Pre Trial Chamber” of the ICC consisting of a Hungarian, a Beninese, and a Mexican who most probably thought the Philippines was another sub-Saharan country, ruled by warlords — the ICC’s main subject of investigations starting in 2006.
The PNP has no warrant of arrest issued by a Philippine judge. The alleged arrest warrant was issued by the ICC, which has no authority in the Philippines, a sovereign nation, even if it insists it does. The Philippines withdrew from the ICC in 2019. While the ICC may argue that that withdrawal can’t stop the proceedings against Duterte, it cannot by any stretch of law claim it can order him arrested, as the Philippines had withdrawn from the ICC, and therefore cannot honor a warrant issued by any foreign entity.
Five
Out of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — which in effect enforces the real rule of law in the world — three are not ICC members: China, the United States and Russia.
The ICC apparently intends to bring Duterte directly and swiftly to its headquarters at the Hague, the Netherlands, as he was brought to Villamor Air base rather than the PNP headquarters in Camp Crame. Villamor Airbase is adjacent to the airstrips for the take-off and landings of international planes at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
The ICC wants Duterte to be brought to Hague to be jailed there for trial for the alleged extrajudicial killings in his war against illegal drugs from 2016 to 2019. Duterte will turn 80 this March, and Sen. Christopher Go disclosed that he is scheduled for a medical procedure today. Duterte has visibly thinned, with videos showing him frail having difficulty even maintaining his balance — indications that he likely has recently acquired serious health problem. The kidnapping obviously is a plot to end his life as soon as possible.
“It seems to me that they are trying to murder the old man,” his son, Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte, posted in Facebook.
Out of the 60 individuals that the ICC had ordered arrested since 2004, it managed to get only 21 brought to the Hague for trial, 18 of which were by ICC third-party members and not the governments of the accused, an indication that such arrests were not supported by the fellow citizens of the accused. The ICC had recently ordered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin to be arrested in connection with their countries’ wars against Palestinians in the case of the former and the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. The two have ignored the ICC’s orders.
Sanctions
The ICC has investigated starting 2006 US soldiers for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, occurring mainly in 2003-2004. These efforts have not led to trials. After Trump threatened the ICC and its officials with unnamed sanctions, the ICC declared that it has “deprioritized” its investigations.
Despite the obvious fact that Marcos’ government was responsible for Duterte’s kidnapping and detention, he has remained silent on it, and his communications officials’ spin is that he had nothing to do with it. However, the Presidential Communications Office issued a statement yesterday that the Manila office of Interpol received the ICC’s communication yesterday morning, and “prosecutor general Richard Anthony Fadullon” served the ICC notification for an arrest warrant against Duterte. While not identified in the PCO press release, Fadullon is the justice department’s prosecutor general, appointed to his post only in November 2024.
In the second sentence after that, the PCO release said “the PNP officials who served the warrant ensured they were wearing body cameras.” It was the Marcos government who kidnapped Duterte as it didn’t have a warrant of arrest against him.
The PCO did not identify who the PNP official was who gave the orders for the arrest and the unit that served the warrant. This is obviously what PNP officials demanded of Malacañang, knowing that the arrest was illegal, grossly violative of the Constitution which would lead to criminal charges against them.
Except for Netanyahu and Putin, all of those tried by the ICC have been heads and warlords of sub-Saharan countries (Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Niger) barely out of the Stone Age, with mostly undeveloped justice systems, which the ICC uses as justification for undertaking their trials. In contrast, ours started in the 16th century under the Spanish colonizers and further developed by the very legalistic US government. The crimes they were alleged to have committed were undertaken during the civil, mainly inter-tribal, real wars in their countries. Those allegedly committed by Duterte were undertaken in the “war” against illegal drugs, which of course wasn’t a real war but intensified police operations against drug lords and dealers, with the legal system in full operation.
Marcos
Marcos would now have the condemnable distinction of being the only head of state in the world to kidnap for the ICC not just a fellow citizen to be brought to the Hague to eventually die of some old age disease. Worse, Duterte was Marcos’ predecessor who even helped him win the presidency. Duterte also ended his term with the highest ever approval rating of 67 percent, which level he largely retained to this day, which means he still has a powerful political base.
The ICC case won’t really stand up in regular courts. I have written several columns on it, and the alleged “crimes against humanity” were all based on biased sensationalist reports, mainly by the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the US-funded website Rappler, and on testimonies by confessed criminals seeking government pardons and help in migrating to the US.
I have proven again and again that 20,000 figure often quoted as the number of the drug war’s victims is fake news, invented by Rappler.com and disseminated by “human rights” groups, mostly seeking funding for their purported crusade. The actual casualties numbered only at most 7,000 in three years’ time, a figure within the acceptable number of collateral in other nations’ campaign against illegal drugs. The power of such fake news to spread has been due to the US wrath against Duterte for drawing the Philippines closer to China and its determination not to have his daughter succeed him in 2028.
This is part of a diabolical, desperate plot by Marcos and his cabal to take out Duterte as a political force as he is, with his daughter Sara, the only obstacle to his family’s perpetuation in power. Duterte is likely to be shanghaied to a Hague prison even before this column sees the light of day, and the ICC will simply ignore Supreme Court decisions ruling it unconstitutional. Marcos’ idea is for Duterte to die from some medical problem in some cold Hague prison, given the reality that ICC cases takes an average of eight years to finish. What an evil president.
However, Marcos seems to have forgotten what happened to his father in 1986. A president blatantly violating the Constitution, with an opposition personality’s blood on his hands, loses the loyalty of the armed forces.
What kind of country have we become that we are allowing such a slap on our sovereignty, by the sitting president no less.
(The second part of my column on the likely change in Trump’s rapprochement with China continues on Friday.)
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Duterte’s ICC kidnapping with Marcos’ help could be the start of BBM’s fall
Source: Breaking News PH
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