DUTERTE HIT BY NEW ICC COMPLAINT OVER DRUG WAR
It calls for Philippine president’s indictment for extrajudicial killings
ACTIVISTS and families of eight victims of the Philippines’ “war on drugs” filed a complaint yesterday with the International Criminal Court (ICC), a second petition accusing President Rodrigo Duterte of murder and crimes against humanity.
The 50-page complaint called for Duterte’s indictment for what it described as thousands of extrajudicial killings, which included “brazen” executions by police acting with impunity.
Critics of Duterte’s fierce antinarcotics campaign were being “persecuted”, it said, and cases filed by the victims’ families had gone nowhere.
The ICC petition, formally referred to as a communication, followed a similar complaint filed in April 2017 by a Filipino lawyer, into which ICC in February started a preliminary examination.
The latest move was led by a network of activists, priests and members of the urban poor communities that have borne the brunt of Duterte’s crackdown. The complaint included testimony from six relatives of eight people killed by police.
“Duterte is personally liable for ordering state police to undertake mass killings,” Neri Colmenares, a lawyer representing the group, said.
Duterte said he had told police to kill only if their lives were in danger. In his annual address to the nation last month, he said the drugs war would be as “relentless and chilling” as its first two years.
Police said the more than 4,400 killed over that time were dealers who had resisted arrest, and denied activists’ allegations of coverups and executions of drug users.
Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said the latest ICC petition was “doomed”, and “would not prosper”, because the Philippines’ had pulled out of the Rome Statute.
The ICC prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Duterte unilaterally withdrew from the ICC’s founding treaty in March, saying the court had not followed due process and presumption of his innocence, in actions that were compounded by “baseless, unprecedented and outrageous attacks” by United Nations officials.
It was a stark contrast from the previous 18 months, when the popular former mayor had repeatedly dared the ICC to investigate him and expressed his readiness to go on trial in The Hague.
The Supreme Court was due to hear oral arguments later in a separate complaint by some opposition lawmakers challenging the legality of Duterte’s withdrawal, which was done without Senate approval. The government’s lawyer will argue that is not required.
Jurist groups said Duterte was not protected from indictment, because ICC’s jurisdiction covered the period of membership, which in the Philippines’ case is from 2011 to March 2019, when the withdrawal takes effect.