So the International Criminal Court has finally set a date for Rodrigo Duterte’s trial, and the British government is clapping like a seal at a fish-throwing contest. November, they say. A landmark moment for global justice, they bleat. But let us not kid ourselves. This is not a triumph of morality but a pageant of political theatre, a revival of the same old colonial reflex that has always dressed up revenge as righteousness.
Let us recall that the ICC was born from the ashes of Nuremberg, itself a victor’s court dressed in the robes of universal law. Duterte’s drug war was barbaric, yes. Thousands dead, extrajudicial killings, a man who joked about gang rapes and told police to shoot first and ask later. The Philippines is a country where justice is a luxury reserved for the rich, and Duterte was its crude, foul-mouthed embodiment. But the ICC’s sudden interest in him after years of ignoring American war crimes in Afghanistan or British misdeeds in Iraq? That is not justice. That is geopolitics with a gavel.
The timing is delicious, is it not? The ICC, long derided as a toothless paper tiger, now finds an easy target in a former colonial subject who made the fatal mistake of being both brutal and weak. The West loves a penitent sinner, but only if he is a foreigner. Duterte will be paraded before the cameras in The Hague, a spectacle for the liberal conscience, while the same powers that bomb Yemen and starve Gaza will pontificate about the rule of law. Hypocrisy is not a bug of the international system; it is a feature.
And what of the Filipinos? The real victims, the families of the dead? They will get their day in court, but do not expect closure. The ICC trial will be less a trial than a ritual, a morality play where the villain is cast, the audience boos, and the curtain falls on a verdict that changes nothing. The drug trade will continue. The poverty that fuelled it will persist. The only thing that will change is that a few Western politicians will sleep better knowing they stood up for “justice” without sacrificing so much as a tax cut.
Britain’s support is particularly rich. This is the country that once jailed Oscar Wilde for sodomy and ruled a quarter of the globe through the maxim that ‘might makes right.’ Now it champions a court that it has never fully submitted to itself. The UK’s own record on human rights is hardly pristine: the Iraq War, the unwritten constitutional mess that lets MPs claim expenses for duck houses, the Rwanda deportation scheme masquerading as asylum policy. But let us not dwell on that. Better to point fingers at a dead-eyed Filipino strongman than to look at the skeletons in our own closet.
Duterte is no saint. He is a thug, a demagogue, a man who mistook cruelty for strength. But the ICC trial is not about him. It is about the West’s need for a moral narrative in an age of crumbling authority. It is about the illusion that justice can be imported, that international law is a force of nature rather than a tool of power. The trial will go ahead. Duterte will probably be convicted. And then we will move on to the next villain, patting ourselves on the back while the world burns.
Is there a better way? Perhaps not. But let us at least admit what this is: a spectacle, a consolation for the comfortable, a sop to the conscience of the global elite. Duterte’s victims deserve justice, but they will get a show trial instead. The British government will preen, the NGOs will celebrate, and the rest of us will be left wondering if the whole apparatus of international law is just a more polite way of waging war. Mark my words: this trial will be a watershed, but not in the way the pundits think. It will be a reminder that justice, like history, is written by the victors.
