On January 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) authorized the court’s prosecutor to resume his investigation into the situation in the Philippines. The investigation covers alleged crimes committed from November 2011 to June 2016, including the large number of extrajudicial killings in Davao City while former President Rodrigo Duterte was its mayor as well as in other parts the country during his presidency up until March 16, 2019, a day before the Philippines’ withdrawal from the ICC’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, took effect.
The Philippine government appealed the decision of the ICC. Unfortunately, however, the ICC rejected the government’s appeal. Consequently, President Marcos, Jr. decided to disengage with any communications, whatsoever, with the ICC.
Before going into the details, one may ask, what/who is the ICC?
The ICC is an independent judicial institution empowered to investigate and prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the crime of aggression. Its establishment in 2002 signaled the commitment of many countries to fight impunity for the worst international crimes. Currently, 123 countries are ICC members, giving the ICC authority under the Rome Statute to investigate and prosecute crimes committed by their nationals or by anyone on their territory. The ICC is a court of last resort, which means that it will only step in if national authorities are unwilling or unable to investigate and prosecute crimes within the ICC’s mandate.
Why did the ICC open an investigation? As stated above, the ICC started an investigation on the Philippines due to former President Duterte’s “war on drugs”, which resulted in thousands of killings, mostly of the urban poor. Moreover, Human Rights Watch and others found that the police regularly falsified evidence to justify the unlawful killings.
Fast-forward to the present, as abovementioned, President Marcos declared that Philippine government is ending its involvement in the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it rejected the government’s appeal to suspend its probe into “drug war” killings. Moreover, he reiterated that the Philippines cannot work with the ICC considering the very serious questions about their jurisdiction and about what we consider to be interference and attacks on the sovereignty of the Republic.
One major problem arises from such disengagement though, despite the Philippines’ departure from the ICC in 2018, which took effect in 2019, the country is still obligated to some actions that occurred during the time it was signatory to the Rome Statute. But let’s how the ICC would respond. (AJDB)
