So the International Criminal Court has set a date. November 30, the trial of Rodrigo Duterte, the former Philippine strongman, will commence in The Hague. And to no one’s surprise, the UK Foreign Office has rushed to confirm its support for the proceedings, tutting approvingly from the sidelines. How very Victorian of them. It is a scene dripping with self-congratulatory righteousness, a ritual that tells us less about justice and more about the West’s enduring need for moral theatre.
Let us not mince words: Duterte’s war on drugs was a bloodbath. Thousands dead, extrajudicial killings dressed up as policy, a state apparatus turned butcher. By any civilised measure, this man deserves a trial. He deserves scrutiny, condemnation, and if the evidence holds, punishment. But to pretend that the ICC’s intervention is a pure act of justice is to ignore the rank hypocrisy that has defined Western foreign policy since the fall of Rome’s last outpost.
The UK, of all nations, knows something about selective memory. It was the British Empire that perfected the art of extrajudicial terror from the Amritsar massacre to the Mau Mau camps. Yet here we are, decades later, patting ourselves on the back for holding a foreign leader to account while our own colonial skeletons rattle in cupboards still unopened. This is not justice. This is the continuation of power by other means.
Consider the timing. The ICC, that bumbling tribunal of last resort, has been notably absent when it comes to prosecuting Western leaders for their own crimes. Iraq. Afghanistan. The drone strikes that rain death on wedding parties. No, no, that would be impolite. Instead, the court focuses on African warlords and now a populist Asian autocrat. It is a mirror of our own intellectual decadence: a civilisation that preaches universal values while practising the most parochial of vendettas.
Duterte’s defence, of course, will play the anti-colonial card. He will claim the ICC is a tool of the old imperial powers, a kangaroo court for the Global South. And he will not be entirely wrong. The Philippines has its own judicial system, flawed as it may be. The principle of complementarity, the very foundation of the ICC, is being trampled here. Why not let Manila try its own man? Because the West cannot trust brown men to do justice, that is why. There is a whiff of Kipling’s “white man’s burden” in these proceedings, the stench of a moralising elite that believes only it can save the savage from himself.
Yet none of this absolves Duterte. He is no victim. He is a brute who revelled in violence, who told police to shoot first and ask later. His defenders will howl about sovereignty, but sovereignty is not a licence to massacre. The question is whether the ICC’s intervention is about stopping such abuses or about maintaining a hierarchy of nations where some are judged and others are judges.
The trial will be a grand spectacle. Legal experts will drone on about jurisdiction and command responsibility. Human rights groups will applaud. The UK Foreign Office will issue more sanctimonious press releases. And in the end, Duterte will likely be convicted. But the rot goes deeper. We are watching a civilisation that has lost its moral compass, that projects its own guilt onto others, that mistakes legal formalities for redemption. Duterte’s trial is not the triumph of justice. It is the death rattle of a liberal order that no longer believes in itself.
Weep, if you must, for the victims of Duterte’s brutality. But weep also for the naive conceit that The Hague can wash the blood from our hands. The empire of law is built on the law of empire. And it has always been thus.
