Why was Rodrigo Duterte arrested by the ICC?
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Today, a leader accused of killing thousands in a ruthless drug war is behind bars. Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has been arrested at Manila airport on an international criminal court warrant. Once untouchable, Rodrigo Duterte will now face justice. What does his arrest mean for his victims, his supporters, and the global fight against crimes against humanity? I'm Kevin Hurtin, and this is The Take.

This is a guy that's used to having his own way, who's used to ordering people and really seeing him like this, literally under siege, being whisked on a flame and knowing that he's going to be in The Hague in a matter of hours. I think that must have confused him a lot.

I'm Carlos Conde. I'm the Philippines researcher for Human Rights Watch. I'm based in Manila. I document the whole gamut of human rights violations and issues in the Philippines.

My orders are to the police and military, also village officials,

And if there is trouble or the situation arises that people fight and your lives are on the line, shoot them dead. Can you give us a sense of just how big a deal this is in the Philippines and maybe just how shocked you were that he'd finally been arrested?

Obviously, this was something that we at the human rights movement, particularly Human Rights Watch, we've been working for this to happen at some point. We were prepared to do kind of battle for the long haul, for the long term. But then suddenly this came. And so it was a kind of a weird way of saying it, a pleasant surprise for a lot of us.

People are still in shock from both sides. And, you know, a lot of victims of the drug war are still trying to process the joy that they're feeling over the arrest of the person that's responsible for the deaths and torture, mistreatment of a lot of them. And also on the other side, the supporters of Mr. Duterte, they cannot believe what's happening. They cannot fathom why this has happened to their idol. Because as you said, Kevin,

He's a huge figure in the Philippines. The most popular president, Barnan, when he ran for office in 2016. He was so unlike everybody else in the Philippines because he projected himself as a common man and that he claimed to have an answer for the many, many problems that we face in this country. That's why he was so well-loved. Duterte himself...

knew this might happen. He gave a speech in Hong Kong where he talked about the possibility of an arrest warrant and defended himself, saying he was ready to go to jail. What I heard is I have a warrant of arrest from ICC or something. They've been after me for a while, these sons of...

But it sounds like even he didn't think it would happen this quickly. Can you walk us through the timeline of events here, a brief TikTok of how this went down and how the ICC managed to pull this off?

So based on my monitoring of what happened in the press, monitoring of the reporting of the press of what happened was that he went to Hong Kong supposedly to attend a political rally for the Senate candidates that his party is endorsing. There's an election coming in May 2025 this year. So he went there and campaigned among overseas Filipinos because there's a lot of overseas Filipino workers in Hong Kong and pretty much everywhere else in the world.

Obviously, a lot of Filipinos were also wondering, oh, was this part of his plan to probably escape and probably seek asylum in China? Because he knew that this was going to happen, that an arrest warrant was imminent. But apparently that wasn't the case. And so he came back. He flew back to the Philippines. And then at the airport, he was accosted by the authorities. And he was taken off the international airport and brought to a

an adjacent military air base where a Learjet was waiting. There was a lot of scuffle. - There was a standoff. - There was a standoff and people were actually fearful that some violence might actually happen. In fact, there were some kind of low level violence that happened where the partner of Mr. Duterte hit a police officer with her phone and he actually sustained a pretty bad bump in the head.

And, you know, there was a lot of shouting. There was a lot of pushing. But in the end, the calm police official who was managing the whole thing managed to convince Mr. Duterte to just board the plane and avoid any more complication. And so throughout the whole thing, he was insisting. You must have seen the video of him, you know, "What's the charge? What am I being accused of?" -For detention. On the basis for detention.

So what is the law and what is the crime that I committed? I think what surprised a lot of people is the fact that this happened so soon and by some accounts so brazenly under President Marcos, who used to be his ally.

Yeah. Okay, clear something up for me. Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the court in 2019, right? It's always been my understanding, at least, that ICC cannot directly arrest individuals in non-member states. So how is it possible the ICC made this arrest?

This is kind of the bone of contention for a lot of people here, especially among the camp of Mr. Duterte, which is that the Philippines was no longer under the jurisdiction of the ICC because it had withdrawn from the ICC in 2019. But actually, under the Rome Statute, there's a very, very clear kind of provision there that says, okay, you can withdraw, but

Any crime that you committed when you were a member still falls under the jurisdiction of the ICC, and that's exactly what the ICC has been asserting here. So that explains why they were able to issue an arrest warrant. Now, the other kink here, Kevin, is that the Philippine government, even by Mr. Marcos' statement,

They don't recognize the ICC. So the Marcos government was actually putting a little bit of a pickle here because, okay, so if they don't recognize the ICC, then how do they effect this arrest if the warrant of arrest comes down? Apparently, what the ICC did was course the arrest warrant through the Interpol.

The Philippines is a member of the Interpol, and it is committed to follow whatever the Interpol says, you know, because they have this close cooperation. Even Mr. Marcos, President Marcos, was saying a few hours after the plane left that that's precisely what they had to do because they were complying with the Interpol. They

They were not complying with the ICC. It's with the Interpol. So it's kind of actually a clever way of going around the ICC thing. Yeah, we should just say the Rome Statute is the treaty that established the ICC. It is, yeah. So, okay. I mean, the end result is that Duterte is going to spend his 80th birthday in an ICC detention facility in The Hague. Yeah. It's remarkable. Let's talk about the case against him. What has the ICC charged him with and when could the trial start?

So he is being charged with crimes against humanity. This is related to the war on drugs that Mr. Duterte launched when he took office in 2016. So the war on drugs, he basically sent out the whole police force to go after suspected drug dealers, drug users, suspected criminals. At least 10,000 people dead in a year, many of them killed by vigilantes believed to be linked to police.

Last week, at least 32 people were killed in police operations north of Manila in just one night. It was the bloodiest night since Duterte launched his so-called war on drugs. Duterte described the killings as beautiful. This was the worst human rights crisis the Philippines has ever experienced.

You know, the police going into communities in the dead of night, they go into houses and start raiding, arresting people and shooting them down. It was very, very violent.

The estimate here by human rights groups, not us, but other human rights groups in the Philippines, is that between 6,000 up to more than 30,000 were actually killed in this raid. That were happening on a daily basis. Four young men have been shot in the past few weeks. The 17-year-old girl was pregnant when police shot her husband. She tells us police asked her to step outside when she heard the shots.

But not only that, Kevin, he is also being investigated for the killings that took place

When the country was still a member of the ICC around 2011 onwards, when he was mayor or vice mayor of this southern city in Davao, where the Dutertes, you know, pretty much controlled for decades now. So I used to be in Davao myself. I used to be a journalist, by the way. So I wrote for the New York Times about the death squad killings in Davao. I documented this for a number of publications in the Philippines back in the early aughts. It was this...

campaign that was as bloody as the Blood War campaign across the Philippines starting 2016. In fact, the killings in Davao was actually the template that Duterte used in the campaign nationwide. So that's why he's being investigated by the ICC. What does the trial look like? I imagine it takes forever to prepare for this. He's 80 years old. When could this start?

It's not clear. I mean, the ICC being the ICC, they take their sweet time. I mean, that's not a criticism, but it takes a while for things to move there. So there's some preliminaries that need to happen in the next few months. And whether an actual trial will commence anytime soon, we actually don't know. We'll have more with Carlos after the break. This week on True Crime Reports...

It's July 2020. We're in the port town of Salerno in Italy. Police have just raided a cargo ship and made an unprecedented discovery. The ship is transporting machinery and paper cylinders. But when police crack them open, inside they find bags and bags stuffed with tiny white pills. 84 million of them.

The pills are a very dangerous, highly addictive drug called Captagon. And this hoard is worth more than $1 billion. It's a drug you may not have heard of, but it's been wreaking havoc across the Middle East. True Crime Reports, a new global crime show from Al Jazeera. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

So, Carlos, you've researched and done advocacy work for years on Duterte's war on drugs in the Philippines. It's a crackdown on people who are allegedly involved in the drug trade or drug users themselves.

For people who don't know about Duterte, maybe you can give us a sense of his arc. This is a guy who started out as a city mayor trying to crack down on drugs in his city in the south of Philippines, where you yourself were a journalist. You knew Duterte in this embryonic phase of his political career. Now he's facing trial for crimes against humanity in The Hague. Can you tell us about this transformation? Did you see signs of this when he was just a mayor?

Well, the thing with Duterte is that contrary to what he's been trying to project, which is that he's this ordinary everyman type of guy, he actually belongs to a powerful political family in the central Philippines and in the southern Philippines. So he's a part of the political elite.

His political career actually began after the 1986 revolution, where the father of the current president was the dictator and was ousted by the people power movement. Among the leaders in the south of the people power movement was Duterte's mother, actually.

The president who took over the dictator Marcos in 1986, Cory Aquino, the widow of Senator Nino Aquino, who the Marcos regime had assassinated at the airport, the same airport where this guy was picked up, named him a vice mayor of Davao City in 1987, if I'm not mistaken. And that started, he used to be a prosecutor before that.

Even when he was a prosecutor, he would say that he was really tough on suspected criminals. And when he was mayor, he really took off. And I think the larger context here of why that happened is because Davao City in that time was actually a very, very violent and complicated city. It was a hotbed of communist insurgents. And it was known at one point as Nicaragdao, after Nicaragua. Yeah, wow. And...

By many accounts, Duterte, when he became mayor, managed to control that and eventually eliminate that. But that came at a cost because he used violence to do that.

I've interviewed him a couple of times when I was at base in Davao. And I remember one time when we were interviewing him and he would regale us with stories about when he was mayor and they caught like a thief and then the thief was brought to his office and then he took out a piece of wood, a firewood, and crushed the thief's hands with it in front of the media, in front of everybody. And it turned out, that's the story though, Kevin. It turned out

that the man that he was just torturing was actually innocent. He did not do it. Yeah. By his own admission, Mr. Duterte's admission. So, you know, that's the kind of personality he had. So he's responding to these very specific drug problem in Davao City, but then he takes it national. Once he's president and he's conducting this on a national scale, does it stop being about drugs and about just power?

I think that was the inevitable trajectory of that. He sold us this idea, this narrative that the drug problem in the Philippines was so bad that drug users were raping, murdering people left and right. If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.

He came at the point when Facebook, the nascent power of Facebook in terms of spreading disinformation was becoming evident, you know, and he used that. His people used that. One of the first disinformation fake news that they seeded in Davao, and they used it during the campaign in 2015, was that Davao was one of the safest cities in the world. And people believe that.

And if you take this in the context, Kevin, of the Philippine democratic experiment as being so still premature, if I may say so, we are still a very dysfunctional democracy. We're patterned after the United States. Which is itself pretty dysfunctional. Tell me about it.

So this is kind of the funny thing about that is that, you know, Filipinos really took to him because of all the things that he had said he had done. And that really, the popularity was really stratospheric. It was like something the Philippines had never seen before. And that actually, that gave Mr. Duterte kind of the carte blanche to do anything. Yeah.

What does this arrest mean for the victims, people who got caught up in and survived, and the families of those who were killed? What are you hearing from them? Well, this certainly has boosted their morale, and this has lifted their spirits. I've seen interviews in the press about, you know, they're crying their hearts out in joy. These families of victims, mothers, a lot of them are mothers.

The first time that Duterte flashed on the screen, I got really emotional. I can totally say that I am happy because how can I be happy knowing that the reason why I'm here in the first place and why Duterte is there on the ICC. But it also reminded me that this is the result of all the calls for justice.

All these years since 2016 when the violence was happening, hardly any chance for them to express redress because there was a climate of fear in all those six years. They couldn't even talk to the police and file complaints because the police would not like to hear any of it and would even manufacture evidence. So these were not investigated and the mothers and the relatives of these victims knew that.

I mean, it's not just schadenfreude. It's not that. It's beyond that. It's the satisfaction that they now suddenly feel at seeing somebody not being punished, not being suffering, but paying for his crimes because that's what it is. Yeah.

Duterte was a really popular figure when he left office in 2022. He had the highest approval rating in Philippines history. And he does have supporters. They're everywhere. They're holding rallies in the Philippines and even abroad.

They say this is all political. Yeah. All part of the ongoing feud between the Philippines, two great political families, the Dutertes and the Marcos. Given that their rivals, the Marcos, are in power. How much do you think politics played a role in this arrest?

Well, we won't deny that politics had a hand in this, but also I think it's wrong to just say that this is all political. The victims, the many human rights organizations, grassroots, I'm not talking about Human Rights Watch, grassroots organizations in the Philippines who had been helping the ICC, the Office of the Prosecutors, gather evidence, they've been working at this from the very, very beginning because they had no choice.

Domestic accountability mechanisms in the Philippines, and when we say that, we're talking about the police, we're talking about the DOJ, we're talking about the prosecutors. Those did not work. Those were dysfunctional. They did not matter at all in terms of giving redress to these victims of the drug war who are mostly poor Filipinos. This is why they pinned their hopes on the ICC, and that is totally, totally understandable.

Keep in mind, Kevin, even when Marcos was still not in the political firmament, this was already happening. It just so happened that the families of Duterte and Marcos had a falling out about a year ago.

And then, of course, if you are a politician up against another powerful politician, of course, you will use every kind of ammunition in your arsenal to go after your opponent, right? And I think this is exactly what happened. So that's not to say that the Marxist government is totally devoid of any concern for human rights. I'd like to think that there's some of that. And that's actually the challenge now for the Marxist administration. It has to take this beyond that. It has to elevate this.

You know, not just the discourse, but even the actions of the government from here on out to demonstrate its commitment, real commitment to human rights, to fixing the human rights problems in the Philippines. And that's what we ultimately want to happen under this administration. Yeah, it was a confluence of interests. Yes, exactly. The right thing to do was also the right thing to do politically.

Okay, so final question. This is obviously momentous for the Philippines, but it's also a massive victory for the ICC, which hasn't had a win in a while. People are even questioning its need to exist. It hasn't been able to arrest people like Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin. So what sort of message does this arrest send in terms of the ICC's relevance moving forward?

Oh, I think there's an immense message here that's being sent, which is that if you're a country in the Global South where your justice system is stacked against you and against poor citizens like the ones in the Philippines, a thing like the ICC can come in and give support, you know, and still functions. I think this gives people in the Global South particularly some, you know, hope that even though

The ICC is under assault. You know, Mr. Trump right now has announced sanctions against the ICC. That's terrible. And you mentioned Netanyahu, Putin. I mean, those guys are probably not going to suffer the same fate of Mr. Duterte because I think the political context is different. But imagine if a situation where more Russians are sick of Putin or more Israelis are sick of Netanyahu, then probably something like this could happen.

Many governments would probably try their best to evade the ICC. But if an opportunity like this comes along, it's better that the ICC is prepared to take that. In the case of the Philippines, I think that's exactly what happened. Without the groundwork laid by the victims, by the human rights movement of the Philippines to file cases at the ICC, even if Mr. Marcos and Mr. Duterte end up literally killing each other, there never would have been an ICC investigation, you know?

I think bottom line to me is that the ICC still plays a very, very crucial, important role in international justice. And I think that's the key message that this case of Duterte will impart to the world. And that's The Take.

This episode was produced by Tamara Kandaker, Sonia Bhagat, and Ashish Malhotra, with Philip Llanos, Spencer Klein, Amy Walters, Chloe K. Lee, Melanie Marich, Hannah Shokir, Remus Alhawari, and me, Kevin Hurtin. It was edited by Noor Wazwaz.

The Take production team is Marcos Bartolome, Sonia Bagat, Spencer Klein, Sari El-Khalili, Tamara Kandaker, Philip Llanos, Chloe K. Lee, Ashish Malhotra, Khalid Sultan, Amy Walters, and Noor Wazwaz. Our editorial interns are Remus Al-Hawari, Melanie Marich, and Hannah Shokir. I'm your host, Kevin Hurtin.

Our engagement producers are Adam Abugad and Vienna Malio. Aya Al-Milik is the lead of audience engagement. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abusalah and Mahanad Almelham. Alexander Locke is the take's executive producer. And Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio. We'll be back tomorrow.