Protesters carry placards showing former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, left, and Senator Ronald dela Rosa in a prison cell are blocked by anti-riot policemen near Malacanang palace in Manila on March 17.TED ALJIBE/AFP/Getty Images
Erik Martinez Kuhonta is the John H. McArthur Research Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada and associate professor of political science at McGill University.
The International Criminal Court’s stunning arrest last week of former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, on charges of crimes against humanity was a powerful strike for human rights and justice. It was also a decisive move by the current President, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., against the Duterte family.
Mr. Duterte was arrested in the Manila airport upon returning from Hong Kong, where he had sought to rally support for his Partido Demokratiko Pilipino party among the Filipino diaspora in the leadup to May’s midterm elections. Mr. Duterte and his coterie of aides were later whisked off on a chartered plane to the Hague.
Mr. Duterte’s lawyer cried foul, claiming that they had not been shown the arrest warrant, that the legal process had been short-circuited, and that the former president had been “abducted.” However, Mr. Marcos argued that the government had an obligation to co-operate with Interpol even if the country had withdrawn from the ICC in 2019.
The ICC indictment relates to a “death squad” that allegedly operated under Mr. Duterte’s watch when he was mayor of Davao, and his signature policy as president from 2016 to 2022 when he implemented his much-vaunted “war on drugs.” The official police estimate of people killed extrajudicially – that is, without legal due process – is about 6,000. Civil society groups claim the number of deaths is likely as high as 30,000. Denied an arrest warrant nor a chance to prove their innocence, many of those who were executed were left on the street with a cardboard sign wrung around their neck accusing them of being drug dealers. Mr. Duterte, proud of these killings, cheered on his police, urging them to keep up the good work. It is thus ironic that Mr. Duterte should now protest that his legal rights have been violated when his government threw out any pretense to due process when waging its so-called war on drugs.
The Marcos-Duterte feud lies at the heart of this successful arrest. Bankrolled by the Marcos dynasty, Mr. Duterte handily won the 2016 elections; in the 2022 elections, the two families united, with Bongbong Marcos running for president and Sara Duterte, the former president’s daughter, running for vice-president. This alliance should have shielded Mr. Duterte from any possible legal challenges to his actions when president. But the combined ticket has quickly unraveled as each family pursued its own political agenda.
There is yet more irony in the fact that the Marcos family has suddenly appeared to be a champion of justice and human rights. Bongbong’s father, Ferdinand Marcos, ruled the Philippines as its dictator from 1972 to 1986, and in addition to some US$5-billion to $10-billion that the Marcos regime has been accused of stealing from the country’s coffers, historians and human rights organizations have documented at least 3,250 extrajudicial killings during the elder Marcos’s reign. The family has not been held accountable for these human rights violations nor for much of their personal wealth, much of which was plundered from the Philippines’ economy. Yet, despite the total failure of transitional justice following the Marcos dictatorship, it is now the scion of the country’s most notorious autocrat who appears to be the advocate of human rights.
Imbricated with this irony is a rising trend in Asia where the law has become a powerful means through which to take down one’s opponents. In Thailand, royalist forces have weaponized the law over the past two decades by using the constitutional court to dissolve political parties that have pushed political reform. In South Korea, the two dominant parties have clashed fiercely about whether impeachment has been used fairly against past presidents. And in the Philippines, Sara Duterte was herself impeached as vice-president in February in the House of Representatives on charges of corruption and graft, betrayal of public trust and other high crimes.
Yet, even if the law is deployed for political purposes, this does not mean that it cannot also have a sound legal and moral grounding. The ICC’s investigation has been years in the making, and it has a strong basis backed by extensive evidence, including the former president’s numerous public exhortations for the killings. Although it may be ironic that Bongbong Marcos can now make claims to the mantle of human rights, the law is nonetheless playing a crucial role in recalibrating the impunity of Rodrigo Duterte’s six long years of extrajudicial killings. Transitional justice may have failed the Philippines in the past, but it has now reappeared under the most unexpected circumstances.