The news arrives with the sobering weight of historical inevitability: Rodrigo Duterte, the former Philippine president who once boasted of killing drug users “like cockroaches”, will face the International Criminal Court in November. The prosecution team, it emerges, will be led by British legal minds. For those of us who track the tremors of international justice, this feels both overdue and profoundly unsettling.
Let us step back from the legal jargon and consider the human cost that underpins this moment. The ICC’s jurisdiction over “crimes against humanity” is not an abstract concept. It refers to thousands of bodies, mostly poor men from Manila’s slums, shot dead in police operations that were sold to the public as a righteous war. The mothers who still hold funeral photos, the children who grew up fatherless, the neighbourhoods where trust in authority evaporated like morning dew. This is the raw material of the trial.
But there is a cultural shift at play here too. For decades, the global north has wielded international law like a gavel aimed at leaders from the global south. Yet the Philippine case is different. It was Duterte’s own withdrawal from the ICC that triggered the court’s retroactive jurisdiction. And now, British lawyers – heirs to a colonial legal tradition that once justified empire – will prosecute a populist strongman. The irony is thick enough to cut.
On the streets of Manila, opinion is fractured. Some see the trial as a vindication of due process, a message that no leader is above the law. Others, still loyal to Duterte’s tough-on-crime rhetoric, view it as foreign interference in sovereign affairs. “He cleaned the streets,” a taxi driver told me last week. “The West doesn’t understand our problems.” This is the class dynamic that often gets lost in the headlines: the drug war was disproportionately supported by the middle classes who felt safer, while the casualties came from the margins.
Yet trials are not about opinion polls. They are about facts and evidence. The British legal team, known for their meticulous approach, will need to prove that the killings were systematic and state-sanctioned. Duterte’s defence will argue that the Philippine justice system is capable of handling any crimes. The clash will be not just legal but ideological: between a globalist vision of accountability and a nationalist defence of sovereignty.
For the families of the victims, the trial offers a sliver of hope for closure. But it also raises uncomfortable questions about the limits of justice. Even if Duterte is convicted, the conditions that made his drug war popular – poverty, corruption, a broken criminal justice system – remain entrenched. The ICC can punish a man, but it cannot fix a society.
As November approaches, eyes will turn to The Hague. The proceedings will be dry, procedural, heavy with exhibits. But behind every document and testimony lies a human story. And it is those stories, not the legal arguments, that will ultimately define how history judges Rodrigo Duterte. The trial is not just about him. It is about us: the observers, the voters, the silent enablers. And that is the most uncomfortable truth of all.
