According to one well-known Filipino commentator, it was just a matter of time. The prosecution of Rodrigo Duterte, the 79-year-old former president of the Philippines for mass human rights violations had already been building up since 2018.
The momentum continued even as he pulled the Philippines out of the Rome statute, the international legal instrument powering the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Birthed in 1998, it binds over 100 governments or state parties together in a pact to punish the most heinous crimes which include genocide, mass atrocities and what human rights activists would call crimes against humanity.
Those accused of such crimes are often state actors, given their capacity to create untold human suffering by murdering not just one but tens of thousands. This would include those of a certain ethnicity, religion, race and in the case of Duterte, an underclass of criminals, he referred to as pusyers, or drug traffickers.
During his time as president, Duterte (above) made good on his populist promise to kill criminals leaving behind a bloody trail of nearly 30,000 victims. This is not including the many others killed when “Dirty Harry” Duterte was mayor of Davao where with his blessings, masked gunmen would conduct “riding-in-tandem” operations on the back of motorcycles.
As the “king” of the southern Filipino city and later president, Duterte’s rule was a spectacle of violence replete with bodies dumped across Manila streets with the faces of victims wrapped in plastic.
When I was conducting research in the Philippines, Duterte continued to loom large, with members of his brood, continuing to occupy powerful positions within the government.
His two sons are prominent politicians both at the local and national levels while his oldest, Sarah is vice-president. Her position, however, remains tenuous given the spectacular falling out between herself and president Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos Jr, the son of Ferdinand Sr of martial law fame.
Despite repeatedly stating that the Filipino authorities would not be rendering any form of assistance to the ICC, the events last Tuesday have given credence to widespread speculation that Bong Bong, has turned on the Duterte.
Some observers have stated that Duterte’s arrest and his transfer on a private jet to the Hague for a pre-trial appearance in front of a three-judge panel was almost too seamless. Amid this drama, his youngest daughter Veronica has taken to social media stating that Duterte had become the victim of a political that he had been denied his rights and that the arrest was an affront to Filipino law and sovereignty.
This message by Veronica is also accompanied by pictures of herself and Duterte Sr during his younger days. Sarah herself also chose words for the Filipino government by stating that what had happened to her father was essentially a form of “state kidnapping”.
Extrajudicial killings
When I read the statements made by the Dutertes, I found them extremely jarring. During my research, I was reminded of the dramatic “wartime” photographs taken by “night shift” photojournalists Vincent Go and Raffy Lerma who have been documenting in gory detail the victims of Duterte’s drug war.
The violence wrought about by so-called extrajudicial killings sometimes by masked assassins sometimes by police personnel in nanlaban encounters continues to reverberate through the lives of the loved ones left behind. In my interviews with the families of the extrajudicial killing victims, many were never even able to identify their perpetrators.
These victims were also never given proper autopsies, prompting an independent forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun to discover entrance and exit wounds in their skulls which indicated that they had been shot from a distance, possibly execution style, contradicting claims by the state that they had died of “myocardial infarction” or heart attacks.
Where is the justice for them? Where was the needed due process? Is this also not a form of state kidnapping but with far more fatal results?
On the night of his arrest, Duterte senior was placed on a private jet surrounded by a coterie of minders who made sure he was well-rested, fed and taken care of. This is certainly worlds away from the slums of Caloocan city where 17-year-old schoolboy Kian de Los Santos was forcibly led to and then shot in a pig sty.
This is also perhaps why an ICC appellate court in 2023 decided that it had jurisdiction in terms of prosecuting Duterte because the justice system in the Philippines simply was not equipped to do so.
The focus now in the Philippines should not be on whether Filipino sovereignty is being threatened, given the opposition generated by the Duterte camp, but that the president stands accused of committing a crime so grave that any given country has “universal jurisdiction”, even without being a state party to the ICC to prosecute.
Extrajudicial killing victims like anyone anywhere are imbued with human rights and should any government of any nation fail to protect even the most basic of these rights other nations must then. This is why the news of Duterte’s arrest is particularly shocking to governments in Southeast Asia.
Rome Statute
The region’s infamous Asean way serves as a stark reminder as to how the region has been historically allergic to any kind of meaningful recognition of international human rights norms. As of now, only two countries within Asean are parties to the Rome Statute since the Duterte petitioned to leave the ICC in 2018.
The withdrawal, however, does not preclude the ICC’s jurisdiction to investigate allegations of human rights violations from when the Philippines became a state party in 2011 during the presidency of Benigno Aquino Jr.
The arrest of Duterte should also be unnerving for these Southeast Asian nations as many of them continue to have literally and proverbially blood on their hands. Thailand under the premiership of Thaksin Shinawatra was responsible for the deaths of thousands of suspected drug traffickers during the period of the early 2000s.
Like Duterte, Shinawatra was a populist extraordinaire appealing to the anxiety wrought by law-and-order issues. In the early 1980s, under the leadership of former Indonesian president Suharto thousands of suspected criminals were killed under questionable circumstances in what is referred to as penembakan misterius (mysterious shootings).
Like in the Philippines, bodies of preman (gangsters) began appearing in public places, to serve as warnings to those who would otherwise engage in similar activities. Indonesian human rights groups have also done well to remind the current government that its president Prabowo Subianto was himself accused of crimes against humanity during his military stint in East Timor.
Prabowo also continues to be closely tied to the kidnapping and disappearances of human rights activists in the late 1990s during the heady days of the reformasi movement. All these incidents have been conveniently forgotten since those said to be responsible continue to have an over-arching influence in the political landscapes of these countries.
Plight of the Rohingyas
The largest elephant in the room, however, remains the plight of the Rohingyas, who for nearly a decade have been forcibly and systematically expelled by the Myanmar military junta to languish in Bangladeshi refugee camps under horrific conditions.
The 2007 Asean Charter which then later birthed the Asean Inter-governmental Commissions on Human Rights has done little to relieve the suffering of the Rohingyas. The AICHR seems more well suited to “encouraging” Asean members to adopt human rights standards rather than enforcing them.
So it is with that knowledge that many of those defending the rights of the Rohingyas have been forced to seek reprieve elsewhere.
In February this year, the international media reported on how the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK had filed a complaint against the Myanmarese government in Argentina under the auspices again of universal jurisdiction resulting in an arrest warrant for several senior members of the junta.
It would seem that justice for victims of human rights violations in the region can only be found in faraway places.
As Duterte now sits in a jail cell at the ICC awaiting his second pre-trial hearing scheduled for Sept 23, we should now re-focus our perspective on the plight of the victims.
There have been reports from local news providers that these families are now facing threats and harassment online from overzealous Duterte supporters.
We should also not forget that they continue to overwhelmingly rely on psycho-social and financial assistance provided by non-governmental and church-based organisations.
It is now high time for the Philippines to provide what they couldn’t during Duterte’s tenure, which is the protection of their basic rights. - Mkini
LEONG KAR YEN is an academic based in Taiwan who after several years of studying the Philippines, believes that it offers important lessons for the region.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.
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