Marcos condemned Duterte to a biased court

Second of three parts

READ the 15-page warrant of arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against former president Rodrigo Duterte. You will be shocked why this president surrendered our sovereignty to that controversial court. Marcos Jr. didn’t even read it, but ordered the police to implement it anyway because, he said, we have commitments to the Interpol to help it, or else it won’t help us. The Interpol has, of course, denied such an arrangement.

Read the warrant of arrest, and you won’t wonder why the US, China, Russia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and 64 other countries have refused to join the ICC. (Copy of arrest warrant posted in rigobertotiglao.com with this column).

How can a court not be a biased court when it ordered the former head of a sovereign nation arrested mostly on the basis on biased media reports (among them Inquirer and Rappler.com) allegations by admitted murderers, who worked deals with the Marcos government to be given immunity in exchange for false testimony against Duterte, and more recently on claims in hearings of the House of Representatives late last year, which didn’t allow the accusers to be cross-examined by Duterte.

The chamber’s presiding judge, Julia Antoanella Motoc, was nominated to the post by her country Romania only in December 2023. She has mostly been in human rights institutions such as the UN Subcommission on Human Rights, UN Human Rights Committee and European Court of Human Rights.

Another judge, Reine Adeleide Sophie Alapini-Gansou, is from the tiny African country you probably never heard of, Benin. It became independent only in 1960. Like the Romanian, Alapini-Gansou’s background is also in human rights, as a member with the African Commission on Human Rights.

Alapini-Gansou should have inhibited herself from being a member of the chamber that decided to arrest Duterte, as she was a member of the Pre-Trial Chamber that authorized in 2021 the full investigation of the charges against Duterte requested by the prosecutor. She is invested in finding Duterte guilty.

Mexican

The third member is a Mexican Maria del Socorro Flores Liera, whose background lies less in the legal profession than in diplomacy, having been permanent representative to several UN bodies in Geneva, mainly the UN Human Rights Council.

All three judges are human rights advocates, who would see human rights violations in every corner of the globe and would not give the benefit of the doubt to somebody like Duterte, who has been condemned already by most of Western media as a “mass murderer.”

They’d likely ignore such legal things as “proof,” “hearsay” and media bias. Nearly 60 percent of the justifications they cited for issuing the warrant of arrest against Duterte were media reports that were cited by Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in her 2023 recommendation to the ICC chamber to undertake Duterte’s trial.

The ICC chamber that will try Duterte would be as if former Commission on Human Rights chairpersons Etta Rosales, the late Chito Gascon and Human Rights Manila representative Carlos Conde were asked to constitute a special court to try human rights complaints.

Presiding judge Motoc would likely think that the Philippines is like her country Romania when it was under the dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, whose communist era was marked by severe repression. So would Alapini-Ganson, since her country Benin has also been a communist-ruled state for 18 years since 1972, marked by widespread persecution, censorship and political imprisonment.

I am certainly not a misogynist but all three judges are women, who presented with concocted tales of rape and teenagers killed by the police — reported in vivid, though invented detail by such anti-Duterte outfits as the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Rappler.com — would, with their maternal instincts, believe these without question, rather than examine if these allegations are substantiated by facts, or are just mere hearsay.

Benin

Why on earth would somebody from Benin or Romania — countries whose legal cultures are not as developed as industrial countries — be put in a body that would judge the former head of state of a major country like the Philippines? This is because of the dynamics of entities based on the voluntary participation of its members who are all of equal stature.

The so-called Rome Statute that established the ICC in 2022 has a stable of 16 judges, appointed not just by their qualifications as legal experts. The statute requires that out of its 16 judges who will be assigned to the three-man chambers, three must be from Africa, two from the Asia-Pacific, two from East Europe, three from Latin American and Caribbean states, and three from Western European countries. In addition, there must be a minimum of six men and six women judges.

Thus, the Romanian Motoc and the Beninian Gastou may not be the most qualified legal experts, but at the particular election cycle their appointment fulfilled either the requirements on the number of judges from their region and/or their genders.

The ICC was created in order to prosecute perpetrators of horrible crimes against humanity such as the genocides against non-Arab ethnic groups by the Sudanese government in 2009, against the Muslim ethnic minority Rohingya by the Myanmar military, the 2007-2008 Kenyan post-election violence and the mass atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These atrocities were mostly committed in the course of a civil war.

What is so despicable is that opposition to the Duterte administration, which included the Communist Party of the Philippines, prodded by the US and now by the Marcoses, have used such institution to accuse the former president of extrajudicial killings during his drug war for propaganda purposes against him or because of their realization that the ICC bleeding-heart judges will be so gullible enough as to convict him of “crimes against humanity.”

Not by any stretch of the imagination can excess in Duterte’s antidrug war — applauded by most Filipinos as stopping in its tracks the country’s transformation into a narco state — be in the same league as genocides and mass murders in African countries wracked by civil wars, which obviously have not fully embraced our notion of civilization as one based on respect for human rights.

Shanghaied

By having Duterte shanghaied to the ICC headquarters to face trial for false charges, Marcos has dragged the country into the mud, putting the Philippines in the same level as African countries where genocides have incontrovertibly occurred.

Marcos and his accomplices know that the ICC case against Duterte doesn’t have a single shred of hard evidence. The killing of Kian de los Santos was heard by a court two years ago, with six policemen found guilty, although their motives had not been determined.

The unholy alliance of the US deep state, the Left and the Marcos camp have pursued the ICC case because they know that these would take seven to 10 years, with some ICC cases stretching beyond 15 years. Three African leaders were even convicted but later acquitted on appeal, the entire process however taking 10 years. With Duterte away from the country, they think he will gradually vanish as a political force, with his vice president daughter to be also removed by impeachment.

With the Dutertes out of the way, and with their ill-gotten billions still stashed away somewhere, it will be his cousin Romualdez next in 2028, and then his son Sandro, who will be 40 years old by 2034, eligible to run for president by then. Open your eyes, guys: This isn’t about justice; it is about the perpetuation of the Marcoses.

Jailed in a strange land with the trauma he is experiencing, the 79-year-old Duterte may not even last out the year. Marcos has inflicted the worst torture on Duterte. I cannot fathom why when he owes his position big-time to him.

To be concluded on March 17, 2025

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Marcos condemned Duterte to a biased court
Source: Breaking News PH