ICC case vs Duterte: A huge, horrific hoax

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THE International Criminal Court’s (ICC) case against former president Rodrigo Duterte is an abomination, a huge, horrific hoax. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will go down in history as more ruthless than his dictator father, in his turning over of a frail 79-year-old former president who cracked down on illegal drugs to a sovereign entity, on false charges.

Marcos incontrovertible motive is to render helpless an opposition leader that could block his clan’s conspiracy to remain in power in at least two election cycles, through 2034. Marcos also is most probably hoping that Duterte will die in a Hague prison, as ICC cases have taken from 3 years to 10 years to complete. Several cases, as in the Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo of Central African Republic, were tried for 10 years, only to be acquitted, with the accused not even given any form of compensation.

By arresting Duterte on charges that obviously do not fall within the definition of genocide nor crimes against humanity, the ICC has become a tool of the Marcoses, for which its prestige will be plummeting as the trial proceeds. It’s a one-way street though; this case has demonstrated the power of the ICC to kidnap anybody it has issued a warrant of arrest for.

All of the 15 cases the ICC has tried since 2002 have been against state leaders and officials in sub-Saharan countries who waged war against their own population, either because these were of different ethnicity or religion (the Darfur genocide) or supported their enemies in elections (Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, Central African Republic). These all occurred during civil wars, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. That such horrible killings could happen were due to the fact that the international rule of law as we know it had hardly developed in these countries, which had the barest judicial systems.

The ICC’s authority to try for crimes citizens of sovereign countries — a violation of the fundamental rule of the community of nations — was justified by its claim it was set up in 2002 mainly by European countries to deliver justice in these countries which had no justice system. In contrast, the Philippines has a well-developed justice system. At least two dozen of the so-called extrajudicial cases in the course of the drug war have been brought to court, and the police involved were arrested and charged.

The gargantuan hoax of the ICC case is that the number of casualties in President Duterte’s intensified police operations was so bloated by a biased media and sensationalized by dramatic photos — primarily by Rappler.com and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which foreign news agencies such as Reuter swallowed hook line and sinker — that the extent of those killed were portrayed as on a scale of “crimes against humanity.”

Prosecutor

The ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda first initiated the charges against Duterte in June 2021 on grounds that there were 12,000 to as many as 30,000 civilians killed in connection with Duterte’s “war on drugs” between July 2016 and March. Thus, Bensouda claimed this big number made Duterte’s WoD a crime against humanity, for which he should be responsible. This claim was made in six other documents of the ICC involving Duterte’s case.

Three years later, on March 25 (after the changes in the composition of the chambers and the prosecutor investigating the allegations), ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber issued a warrant for Duterte’s arrest, on the ground that he was responsible in that period for 43 killings, 19 carried out by an alleged Davao Death Squad, while he was Davao city mayor from June 2013 to June 2016, and 24 by the police when he was president and undertook his war against drugs from July 2016 to November 2019.

If the ICC prosecutor defines 43 killings in the 21 months from July 2016 to November 2019 in the course of antidrug police operation as crimes against humanity, then the US police (and most other police forces) are incontrovertibly criminals against humanity. There were 50-150 civilians killed in 2023 by America’s police in the course of similar killings, for an average (using the lower limit of 50) of 4 killings per month. This computes to 87 in the 21-month period, double the number the Duterte’s forces are accused of killing, 43.

Chamber

While the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber that issued the arrest warrant did not, as the ICC’s past documents do, assert that “30,000 civilians were killed in Duterte’s WoD,” it was very unprofessional in sneaking in this false idea to justify its accusations against Duterte that the killings were of a huge scale:

“The Duterte administration’s 2017 Yearend Report of Key Accomplishments recorded 3,967 drug personalities killed between 1 July 2016 and 22 November 2019, and a further 16,355 drug-related homicide cases during a similar period, suggesting a total of 20,322 killings.”

The ICC deliberately lied here. The Duterte government’s yearend report did not “suggest a total of 20,322 killings.” The lie that it did is based on the false distortion of a PNP report made by Jose Diokno, a lawyer known for chasing alleged human rights violations, in a hearing of a congressional committee in June 2024.

The PNP report was that there were 3,967 “drug personalities who died in antidrug operations from July 1, 2016 to November 2017” and 16,355 homicide cases under investigation in roughly the same period. This category of “cases under investigation” had nothing to do with the war on drugs, with the killing committed for various reasons, from being passion killings to premeditated murders. Diokno, however, added the police data on deaths due to the drug war, 3,967, to the 16,355 homicide cases under investigation, to lie to a Congress committee that such a huge figure, 20,322, were killed in Duterte’s war against drugs. The official PNP report is that those killed in the anti-drug campaign until Duterte stepped down totaled 6,191, which three independent researches roughly confirmed, and which jibes with the country’s homicide rates.

The claim of thousands of civilians killed in the 25-month drug war would be instantly debunked if these figures are compared to the Philippines’ total homicide rates. From 2016 to 2019, there were roughly 29,529 homicides of all kinds in the Philippines.

Absurd

The claim that there were 12,000 to 30,000 drug-related killings is absurd. This would mean that nearly 100 percent of homicides in the Philippines in that period were drug-related. However, the homicide rate even went down in that period, as crime rates went down with Duterte scaring them into stopping: 10,991 homicides in 2016 to 5,554 in 2018, and 4,854 in 2019. Indeed, an increase by 12,000 to 30,000 corpses because of the alleged drug-related killings would have required a doubling of the capacity of funeral services, which of course would have made headlines, as happened in New York during the Covid-19 pandemic. There were no such newspaper stories headlining such increase of deaths.

In 2022, the Philippine government responded to the ICC case by pointing out that the allegations against Duterte weren’t of “sufficient gravity” for it to investigate these. Indeed, the ICC chamber itself noted that “the Statute has always had threaded through it the idea of gravity — that the Court should try only the most serious cases of truly international concern.” Indeed, the genocides in sub-Saharan countries are of a totally different genre from killings by the police in Duterte’s war on drugs. Many of the atrocious ones were undertaken by rogue police members against their former accomplices so they could not testify against them.

The Prosecutor replied: ” In the present situation, the available information demonstrates that an estimated 12,000 to 30,000 civilians (including children) have been killed by police or by “unidentified” perpetrators apparently acting in coordination with police.” Several reports that would outrage people were based on fictitious quotes the journalists invented to embellish their articles.

The ICC document listed in a footnote some of this “available information,” which were not information but about a hundred unverified media articles, among them: Human Rights — ‘Philippines’ Duterte’s ‘drug war’ claims 12,000+ lives”; Reuters — “War on numbers: Philippines targets drug killing data”; the Manila Times — “Counting the killings: 20,000 and rising”; PhilStar — “29,000 deaths probed since drug war launched”; the Atlantic — “The Uncounted Dead of Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippine Drug War,” Aug. 19, 2019.

This will be the first ICC case based on biased reports by media. These were not innocently made; they followed the line of the US deep state that wanted Duterte punished for drawing the country close to China and distancing it from the US, and wanted to make sure that another Duterte won’t become president to continue his defiance. The message the US has sent through its control of the ICC: Fuck us and you’re dead.

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ICC case vs Duterte: A huge, horrific hoax
Source: Breaking News PH