A human rights lawyer said on Friday that the International Criminal Court’s decision to resume its investigation into the drug-war policies of the late President Rodrigo Duterte did not surprise him.
Last year, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan requested that the investigation be reopened, claiming that the Philippine government had not shown that it had looked into or was looking into offenses within the jurisdiction of the war crimes court.
Ruben Carranza, senior specialist at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, said that the conclusion was not unexpected.
“The efforts of the Philippines to justify deferral are clearly, you don’t even have to practice at the ICC to know that these were simply just waste of delaying the outcome, which is only to proceed with the investigation,”
“This is not a trial but this is a significant outcome because it removes that barrier,” he added.
After launching a preliminary investigation into the drug campaign in 2019 and launching a formal inquiry later that year, Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the Hague-based tribunal.
However, the investigation was shut down in November 2019 after Manila declared it was re-evaluating several hundred cases of drug operations that resulted in killings at the hands of hit men, vigilantes, and police.
Officially, 6,181 people died in Duterte’s “war on drugs,” but rights group claim the number might be as high as 30,000, including innocent victims, and that security personnel were riddled with corruption and allowed to act without consequence.
The government must work with the ICC even though it withdrew from the court, according to attorney Ray Santiago, co-chair of the Philippine Coalition for the International Criminal Court.
“The best way for the Philippine government is it’s either to support the process of the ICC or if it wants to stop the proceedings then to follow what the ICC is saying that you should really conduct honest to goodness investigations as to the thousands of deaths related to the drug war here in the Philippines,” he said.
In a statement Thursday, the ICC said its pre-trial chamber “is not satisfied that the Philippines is undertaking relevant investigations that would warrant a deferral of the court’s investigations”.
“The various domestic initiatives and proceedings, assessed collectively, do not amount to tangible, concrete and progressive investigative steps,” it added.
President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., Duterte’s successor, has vowed to carry on the drug war but with an emphasis on prevention and rehabilitation. However, he has so far ruled out re-joining the ICC.
In a rare conviction of a crackdown enforcer, a Philippine police officer was sentenced to prison in November for fabricating evidence and torturing two adolescents who were slain at the height of Duterte’s drug war.
