WARNING TO POWER

In the current world order, any one, whether former dictator, or president for life, is fair game for prosecution for the crimes they committed while so confidently ensconced in their gilded halls and palaces.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) isn’t as useless as President Rodrigo Duterte described it when he learned it was looking into the possibility of prosecuting him for crimes against humanity. But the ICC record over the last 16 years since it was established hasn’t been spectacular either.

The Court is mandated to prosecute political leaders who have committed the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. But in a world rife with racist tyrants, neo-Nazi and fascist dictators, and other vermin who use state power to torture and murder, since 2002 it has managed to convict only a relatively few of those guilty of the crimes mentioned, most of them from the African continent. It has ordered the arrest of 33 others, however, and 23 trials are ongoing.

The ICC Office of the Prosecutor, as it announced two weeks ago, is looking into the killings in the Philippines. It has also started preliminary “examinations” on other countries, among them Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Colombia, Palestine, and Gabon, the political and military leaderships of which have been accused of war crimes and/or crimes against humanity.

The “examination” into the Philippine situation, particularly on the possibility that Mr. Duterte may be accountable and tried for crimes against humanity in connection with the killing without due process, meaning extrajudicially, of some 14,000 suspected illegal drug users and pushers including women and children, is in response to a complaint filed by a Filipino lawyer, who is, incidentally, in hiding for fear for his life. It is the first ICC case of its kind in Southeast Asia.

Mr. Duterte has downplayed the ICC “examination” while at the same time asking why he has been singled out when there are others who are presumably more, or equally accountable. Rather than singling out Mr. Duterte, however, the ICC is required by its internal procedures to look into such complaints. And not only is the number of extrajudicial killings (EJKs) in the Philippines since 2016 unprecedented — being way above the 3,000 killed during the 14 years of the Marcos dictatorship and the over 1,000 during the nine years of the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo regime — it is also unequalled in Southeast Asia in recent times, with the possible exception of the killing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Burma).

But the regime’s problems with international attention to the number of casualties in its “war” on drugs isn’t limited to the ICC examination and Mr. Duterte’s possible indictment for crimes against humanity. About 45 countries have also asked the United Nations to look into the alarming human rights situation in the Philippines with which international and domestic human rights organizations, churches, the independent media, and civil society are understandably outraged.

The Duterte regime’s Foreign Affairs Secretary, Alan Peter Cayetano, has assured the international community that the regime will cooperate with the UN, but will not welcome that body’s High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings and Summary or Arbitrary Executions Agnes Callamard, whom the regime has repeatedly insulted, defamed, and mocked for supposedly prejudging it. Mr. Duterte had earlier challenged her to a debate, which Ms. Callamard rejected, that not being her function. Special Rapporteurs are mandated to get information on the specific country they’re tasked to investigate, rather than engage in polemics with its head of state.

In one more demonstration of the chaos and opacity so characteristic of the regime, despite Mr. Cayetano’s announced assurance of cooperation, Mr. Duterte ordered the police and military not to answer the questions of any UN investigator.

It’s not exactly something new for the UN. Every country with something to hide has taken the same path. State security forces have never been, for obvious reasons, UN rapporteurs’ only source of information. Their sources have included human rights defenders, civil society groups, the media, and the victims and kin of those whose rights have been violated.

As problematic as a UN investigation will be for the regime, which can happen because the Philippine judicial system is either unwilling or unable to look into the wholesale violation of the human rights that the country, as a signatory to international protocols, is duty-bound to protect, there is another problem Mr. Duterte and his accomplices might have to deal with.

It is the possibility that once in another country, they can be arrested and tried by that country’s courts should its policies include recognition of the principle of “universal jurisdiction” over crimes so egregious and so damaging to the international community that it empowers any country to try the perpetrators even if the crimes were committed elsewhere.