The hearing that opened in The Hague on Monday is being called a historic moment for international justice. It is also, if you look at how we got there, a fairly damning record of everything that should have happened here first and didn’t.
Duterte left Malacañang in June 2022. For the next 33 months he lived in Davao, gave press conferences, sat through Senate hearings where he bragged openly about ordering killings, and went home afterward without a single charge filed against him. The Commission on Human Rights had the documentation. The Senate had the testimony. The Ombudsman — the office the Constitution specifically built to go after officials like him — sat on its hands. Not one Philippine prosecutor, in three years, found grounds to move.
The ICC issued a warrant. Philippine authorities arrested him within hours.
That speed is worth sitting with. The 80-page operations plan, the airport interception, the code name — all of it executed cleanly and quickly. Which means the capacity was always there. The question is why it existed for a warrant from The Hague and not for charges that could have been filed from Padre Faura.
The answer is not that we lacked laws. RA 9851 covers crimes against humanity under Philippine law. We had statutes. We had evidence. We had three years of a former president freely available for prosecution. What we didn’t have was anyone in a position of authority for whom accountability was more useful than protection.
That changed when the Marcos-Duterte alliance fell apart. By the time Sara Duterte was impeached and the political friendship was publicly over, the former president had become a problem his old ally needed off the board before the 2025 midterms. The ICC warrant arrived at exactly the right moment for exactly the wrong reasons. We surrendered Duterte to The Hague not because we finally believed in international justice but because Marcos needed him gone and this was the cleanest way to do it.
The Philippines has still not rejoined the Rome Statute. That detail keeps getting buried in the coverage. A government that hands over a former president to an international court while refusing to formally rejoin that court is not making a principled stand. It is making a transaction.
Transactions are not reforms. They don’t rebuild anything. The Ombudsman that didn’t move on Duterte between 2022 and 2025 is still the Ombudsman. The prosecutors who found no grounds to charge him are still prosecutors. The Senate that produced volumes of testimony nobody converted into a case is still the Senate. None of the institutions that failed have been retooled. We outsourced the problem to the ICC and called it accountability.
Here is why that matters beyond the Duterte case specifically: Ronald dela Rosa and Bong Go are named in the ICC filings as co-perpetrators. Both are sitting senators. Neither faces any domestic legal jeopardy. Sara Duterte — who polls show as a frontrunner for 2028 — has her own pending impeachment case in the Senate, to be tried by colleagues who include some of the same people the ICC named in her father’s case. The institutional failure that let Duterte operate untouched for three years after leaving office is not a closed chapter. It is the operating condition of Philippine politics heading into the next election cycle.
For anyone trying to assess what this country’s governance trajectory actually looks like over a ten-year horizon — not the press release version, the actual version — the relevant question is not whether Duterte gets convicted in The Hague. It is whether the next administration can be held to account by Philippine institutions rather than only by rival political families or international courts when it becomes convenient. We have a documented answer to that question from the last three years. It is not a good answer.
The families of the dead deserve whatever justice The Hague can produce. But the story being written internationally — that the Philippines demonstrated its commitment to the rule of law — needs to be read more carefully. We demonstrated that we will enforce accountability when the current administration finds it useful. That is a much smaller thing than it is being made to sound.
The author writes in a personal capacity.