So it is settled. Rodrigo Duterte, the strongman who once boasted of killing drug dealers with the same casualness one might swat a fly, will face the International Criminal Court in November. The United Kingdom, ever the diligent guardian of global morality, has pressed for ‘full accountability’. One can almost hear the collective sigh of satisfaction from London to New York. But let us not mistake this for a triumph of justice. It is a spectacle, a ritual sacrifice on the altar of liberal guilt, performed for an audience that has long forgotten the distinction between justice and vengeance.
Consider the historical parallels. The ICC is a curious institution, born from the ashes of Nuremberg yet haunted by the ghosts of colonialism. It prosecutes the vanquished, not the victors. Where is the tribunal for Blair’s Iraq adventure? For the drone strikes that rain death on wedding parties in Yemen? The silence is deafening. Duterte is a coarse and brutal figure, no doubt, but his trial reveals the selective morality of the West. We tut-tut at Manila’s drug war while arming the very cartels that fuel it. Hypocrisy, it seems, is the only consistent policy of the so-called international community.
And what of the Philippines itself? The Duterte faithful will see this as a foreign assault on their sovereignty, a new form of imperial meddling. They are not entirely wrong. The ICC’s jurisdiction rests on a treaty, but sovereignty is not a piece of paper. It is blood and soil, history and pride. To strip a leader of his immunity is to say that a nation’s internal affairs are no longer its own. This may be a comforting thought for globalists, but it is a dangerous precedent. Will the ICC next summon Narendra Modi for Kashmir? Or Benjamin Netanyahu for Gaza? Do not hold your breath.
The timing, too, is revealing. The trial comes as the West scrambles to reassert its moral authority in a multipolar world. China and Russia have long dismissed the ICC as a tool of Western hegemony. Duterte’s trial will only deepen that perception. The court’s docket is stacked with Africans, a fact that has not gone unnoticed. Now it adds an Asian strongman. How progressive. But let us be honest: this is not about human rights. It is about demonstrating that no leader, not even a populist darling of the non-aligned, is above the law. Except, of course, those who write the law.
Yet one cannot entirely dismiss the charge sheet. Duterte’s war on drugs was a carnival of extrajudicial killings, a pogrom dressed up as policy. Thousands died. Families were shattered. The rule of law was a joke. For this, he must answer. But the answer must be more than a show trial in a faraway court. The real justice would be a Philippines that finds its own reckoning, its own catharsis. That is unlikely. The elites who cheered Duterte’s ruthlessness will now decry his persecution. The poor who supported him will feel betrayed by the very forces that claim to champion them.
So let the trial proceed. Let the lawyers duel over jurisdiction and evidence. Let the pundits moralise. But do not pretend this is the end of impunity. It is a footnote in a larger story of decline: the decline of Westphalian sovereignty, of national self-determination, of the very idea that a people can choose their own monsters. We are all subjects now, subject to the whims of a court that answers to no electorate. The irony is that Duterte, for all his faults, understood this game. He knew that power, not law, decides. The only question is: who holds the gavel?
