The ICC hoax: Hard data demolish ‘widespread EJKs’ charge vs Duterte
THE International Criminal Court’s (ICC) case against former president Rodrigo Duterte is an abomination and 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. He could have asked the Supreme Court to rule first on the constitutionality of surrendering a former — and extremely popular — president to a foreign entity.
He instead ordered Nicolas Torre, his thug disguised as a police official, to forcibly bring the former president to the ICC, hoping that Duterte’s disappearance would dissipate his political base.
Now, Marcos and the ICC appear to be intent on further trampling on our sovereignty, with the Palace spokesperson saying that this administration will deliver two senators of the Republic, Ronald dela Rosa and Christopher “Bong” Go, to that body when it issues warrants against them. Marcos, of course, would be delighted to do that: It will reduce to just seven the nine senators who have refused to bow down to his will or be bought by him.
What makes Duterte’s kidnapping and the planned abduction of the two senators so appalling is that there is really no evidence that the ICC prosecutors’ allegations of “widespread extrajudicial killings” (EJKs) occurred. There is no hard data to show there is an iota of truth to ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s claim that “the total number of civilians killed in connection with the WoD (war on drugs) between July 2016 and March 2019 appears to be between 12,000 and 30,000.”
How many victims does ICC base its allegations against Duterte’s anti-drug war that make it a crime against humanity? Forty-three: “(a) at least 19 persons, allegedly drug pushers or thieves, were killed by members of the DDS in various locations in or around Davao City; “(b) at least 24 persons, allegedly criminals — such as drug pushers and thieves — or drug users, were killed by or under the supervision of members of the Philippines’ law enforcement” (p. 7, ICC Document No. ICC-01/21, 7 March 2025).
Human rights
Contrast that to the over 11,103 identified as human rights victims under dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos’ regime, each of whom was ordered to be given remuneration by a US court.
It’s a hoax, manufactured and disseminated by the communists (who were decimated by Duterte), the Marcos camp intent on denying his daughter Sara the presidency, and US strategists who fear another Duterte in Malacañang would mean the removal of their nine military bases in the country.
The allegations are based on biased media reports, with Rappler and leftist NGOs succeeding in exaggerating the official report of 6,252 deaths involving the anti-drug campaign to the 12,000 to 30,000 that the ICC prosecutor has alleged.
The hard numbers on killings in the country from 2010 to 2023 do not support the narrative of “unprecedented, massive EJKs” under Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug campaign. When you look at total homicide deaths year by year, the story that emerges is not a sudden explosion of killings from 2016 onward, but a spike in the first Duterte year, followed by a sharp and sustained decline to levels well below the Aquino years.
The first chart here gives the total homicide deaths in the Philippines from 2010 to 2023 reported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which compiles such data, as well as the Philippine Statistics Authority:
These data debunk the claim that Duterte’s war on drugs unleashed a wave of killings.
First, during the administration (2010 to 2015) of President Benigno Aquino III, yearly homicide deaths were in the 8,000–9,700 range, trending up, not down, the result of the breakdown of peace and order, to a large part due to the proliferation of illegal drugs.
Second, there was indeed a spike in 2016: 11,300 homicides, a jump of roughly 1,600 from 2015. That is consistent with the reality that the initial phase of the drug war was bloody, messy and chaotic, with drug criminals resisting violently and even liquidating their accomplices to avoid being identified. But the ICC prosecutor and the anti-Duterte camp falsely claim that the 2016 spike extended to 2019, when the campaign against drugs was ended.
Third, from 2017 onward, homicides fell sharply and then stabilized at almost half the Aquino-era levels. From 2018 to 2023, total homicides hovered between 4,600 and 5,500 per year: How could there be 12,000 to 30,000 killings under Duterte? There were even fewer homicides per year during the bulk of the Duterte years than during any year in the 2010-2015 Aquino period.
Carnage
If there were a sustained carnage of “12,000–30,000 EJKs” — or the 60,000 the leftist lawyer now with the ICC itself, Kristina Conti, and the Left have been screaming — you would expect total homicides to explode into the 15,000–20,000 range and stay elevated for several years. The data show the opposite: After a spike in one year, homicides drop even well below those during the Aquino III administration.
Contrast this to the very real 43,700 deaths reported due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, which was reflected in official statistics as shown in the second chart:
In short, that there were 12,000 or even 30,000 EJKs, which would certainly mean a crime against humanity, is a fiction, not borne out by actual data. The perception that there was is another classic case of media brainwashing, in this case by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Rappler, and the Philippine Star with their full-page tearjerking pictures, such as the one of a woman hugging the lifeless body of her boyfriend allegedly killed by the police. Such cases indeed happened, but to claim that there were 12,000 such instances is pure fiction.
Common sense would easily debunk that exaggeration: Our morgues and funeral parlors would not have been able to process the surge in corpses, resulting in macabre scenes of corpses stored outside their facilities, which would have been headline news for weeks.
In many earlier columns, I have shown that the “30,000 EJKs” figure was cobbled together from claims of anti-Duterte entities, not from any coherent national dataset. Critics lumped together “deaths under investigation” and “found dead,” regardless of motives reported, as drug-related killings. NGOs reported double-counted incidents to conclude the total was the number of EJK killings — which, of course, did not conform to the hard data.
If the drug war created an unprecedented wave of state-orchestrated murder, which would be a crime against humanity, where is that wave in the national homicide data?
Propagandists
In fact, nine years after Duterte’s war on drugs, Duterte haters like the cleric Flaviano Villanueva, once a drug addict himself, could produce a list of only 104 cases — which, however, were not even verified by independent investigators. Villanueva, in desperation, even publicly appealed (to no avail it seems) to alleged relatives of victims to work with him to document the cases. I wouldn’t be surprised if he told them that they should do so in case some court later decides to provide the relatives with compensation.
You can criticize Duterte’s war on drugs for due process violations, for police impunity in particular cases, and for its failure to address the political economy of the drug trade. But you cannot defend an inflated carnage of “30,000 EJKs” by simply ignoring official homicide data that show a sustained fall in killings. All Duterte’s accusers can present are dramatic anecdotes appealing to emotions, that is, cases of EJKs, which, however, cannot be projected to total 30,000.
A mediocre academician, of whom I wonder why he has a column here, even headlined his column: “Why did Filipinos condone Duterte’s war on illegal drugs?” He answered his own question by imagining some psychological weakness of Filipinos.
If he had just done some easy research, he would have learned that the data show what most Filipinos intuitively concluded. There was indeed a major increase in homicides in 2016 because an intensified campaign against illegal drugs was launched. But the campaign’s success ushered in a period of low homicides. Many Filipinos (including me) had friends or relatives dying because of Covid-19. Most Filipinos, if not for the newspaper headlines and photos, did not even notice that there was a war against drugs. Why would Filipinos condemn Duterte’s war on illegal drugs?
Perhaps it’s Duterte’s fault to have called his government’s campaign against illegal drugs “war on drugs.” The dense ICC judges took the metaphor literally and therefore swallowed hook, line and sinker the notion that Duterte had waged a real “war,” which of course always results in many innocent deaths.
It is so disgusting that Marcos ordered a frail elderly man, a former president elected by 17 million Filipinos, to be thrown in jail in a cold cell in the Netherlands, on the basis of the ICC’s dogma — which contradicts all notions of justice and fairness — that a man is guilty until proven innocent. He’d likely be in jail for 7 to 10 years, the average number of years it has taken the ICC to issue a judgment.
But let’s not forget the real culprits of this abomination, an insult to our sovereignty and to every notion of fairness. Marcos ordered Duterte’s kidnapping and delivery to the ICC as a way, at least he thinks, of weakening or even dismantling his political influence and consequently that of his daughter Sara, a shoo-in for president in 2028. He’d better pray hard that Duterte doesn’t die in prison, or the mammoth demonstrations accompanying his funeral cortege would engulf Malacañang.
The more sinister figure behind this travesty, though, is the US that thinks that, after what they managed to do to Duterte, no Philippine president would ever dare to break free from American vassalage.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
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The ICC hoax: Hard data demolish ‘widespread EJKs’ charge vs Duterte
Source: Breaking News PH
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