In the Philippines, a Triumph for International Law or the ICC’s Lucky Break?

On March 11, Philippine police arrested Rodrigo Duterte, the country’s former president, on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The 79-year-old was swiftly transferred to the Villamor Air Base, where hours later he was placed aboard a chartered jet and flown to The Hague, Netherlands. There he was handed over to the custody of the ICC, which has accused the former leader of crimes against humanity for extrajudicial killings carried out during his anti-drug campaigns.

The sensational chain of events made headlines across the globe. It was applauded by human rights activists, foreign governments, and other observers, who said Duterte’s arrest represented a victory for the ICC at a time when the court is under assault by powerful governments including the United States.

Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said that the arrest was “a critical step for accountability in the Philippines.” Agnès Callamard of Amnesty International described it as “long-awaited and monumental step for justice for the thousands of victims and survivors of his administration’s ‘war on drugs.’” U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said that it was “a very important step towards seeking accountability.” Harry Fields of The Guardian wrote that the arrest “helps make the court and its mission feel less theoretical.”

All of this is undoubtedly true. From almost the moment that he took office in June 2016, Duterte prosecuted a fierce anti-narcotics campaign that involved the nearly unrestricted use of lethal force to tackle the scourge of illegal drugs. During Duterte’s six-year presidency, thousands of people – independent estimates range from 12,000 to as many as 30,000 – were killed in extrajudicial “encounters” with police. Most of these were drug users, but the victims of the drug war also included children and other innocents who were caught in the crossfire. The fact that the architect of this suffering stands to be held accountable for these killings is of monumental importance for those affected by Duterte’s presidency.

However, some have gone a step further, arguing or implying that Duterte’s arrest sounds a universal warning for despots in other parts of the world. Callamard warned, “To those in power now who think that they are above the law – think twice, think carefully. Time will come: you will not enjoy impunity forever, no matter how powerful you are now.” In a statement, the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M) said that the arrest portended difficulties for that country’s military dictator, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who is also under investigation by the ICC for the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in 2017. As SAC-M founding member Marzuki Darusman put it, the Philippines arrest “will serve clear notice to Min Aung Hlaing that his time in the dock will surely come.”

However, while Duterte’s arrest is a welcome win both for the victims of the drug war and the project of international justice, its broader lessons are more ambiguous. The arrest would never have happened were it not for the unusual domestic political developments of the past 18 months – in particular, the remarkable deterioration in relations between the Duterte clan and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

When he came to office in 2022, Marcos said that he had “no intention” of rejoining the ICC (Duterte withdrew the Philippines in 2019) and made it clear that he would not cooperate with the court’s investigation into the “war on drugs.” In September 2022, his administration officially requested that the ICC halt the investigation, saying that the court “has no jurisdiction over the situation in the Philippines.” At the time, of course, Duterte was his ally – part of the “Uniteam” that stormed the 2022 presidential election and raised Duterte’s daughter Sara to the vice presidency.

However, when Duterte transmuted from an ally to an enemy, Marcos began to see how the ICC investigation could be used to his own benefit.

Duterte’s arrest is very welcome news, even if Marcos’ motivations were less than pure – but it’s hard to argue that for other aspiring war criminals or genocidaires the threat of the ICC looms especially large.

The court is currently under siege. It has been widely attacked for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, even by foreign governments (such as the United States and France) that applauded its release of an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2023. In 2025, it is hard to argue that the world is any closer to a world of universal accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

In reality, in the case of Duterte and the Philippines, the ICC has been the beneficiary of a good deal of luck. In a March 12 article for Rappler, John Nery identified three “calamitous” mistakes by Duterte that, “through their accumulated weight, brought him, a former strongman, directly to Villamor Airbase and pushed him up the stairs of the chartered Gulfstream taking him to The Hague.”

The first of these mistakes was to withdraw the Philippines from the ICC in 2019, which, by broadcasting the notion that Duterte considered himself unaccountable to the law, “only made him even more vulnerable to a potential criminal case.” His second major misstep was his failure to line up a successor to run at the 2022 presidential election. This “undermined his position in the new administration,” during which Duterte entered his ill-fated pact with the Marcoses, and became “merely the retired leader of yet another political faction.”

The third mistake, flowing from the second, was Duterte’s decision to declare war on the Marcoses and their allies. As Nery wrote, “[I]t is possible that he mistook his still-high ratings as a measure of his political capital; it is more likely that, ever since he entered politics, he knew only to move at one speed: reckless.”

Not all leaders – and not even all authoritarian leaders – can be counted on to be as impulsive and mercurial as the Philippines’ 16th president. Rather than being the beneficiary of the inexorable bending of history’s arc toward truth and justice, the ICC sat at the receiving end of an unlikely concatenation of domestic political developments and hubristic missteps that very few predicted even a year ago.

At the same time, it can’t be denied that the ICC deserved a lucky break.