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IN-PERSON: Hedley Bull Lecture Theatre 1, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, 2601

The Philippine drug war killings before the ICC: Lessons on complementarity and treaty withdrawal

Today, former President Rodrigo Duterte is in prison at the International Criminal Court in The Hague to answer for the crime against humanity of murder. Duterte proudly launched his “War on Drugs” as the core of his election campaign, pledging that “the fish in Manila Bay will grow fat” with the corpses of victims – and indeed, Manila’s funeral shops were overbooked soon after.

And yet Duterte remains popular, so well loved despite the official count of around 6,000 victims and estimates of 20,000–30,000 actual killings. To this day, the Duterte brand remains formidable – surveys show that if elections were held today, his daughter Sara Duterte would be elected President. Ordinary people love him, even though the victims were mainly poor, small-time drug users and, strangely enough, there was not a single victim in Manila’s wealthy residential neighbourhoods.

Despite openly bragging about the killings and unapologetically encouraging the police to kill, including in statements made under oath during legislative hearings, Duterte was never investigated or charged before Philippine courts. In only eight cases were low-level gunmen actually tried in court.

The situation in the Philippines highlights two major issues in International Criminal Law. The first is the principle of complementarity: that the ICC is a court of last resort and intervenes only when national authorities cannot deliver justice. The second is treaty withdrawal. Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the Rome Statute and has insisted – wrongly – that he is therefore beyond the reach of the ICC.

We debate these issues in relation to the rule of law in the Philippines. They expose, first, the weaknesses of a legal system that looked the other way despite the massive scale and brazenness of the killings and, second, the folly of a democracy that applauds and rewards such impunity.

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