Phl now open to ICC probe on ‘war on drugs’

More than a whiff of fresh air.

The Marcos Jr. administration now says it’s willing to sit down with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to discuss “certain areas” of cooperation on the latter’s investigation, started in 2018, on former president Duterte’s “war on drugs.” The timeline goes back to the time he was Davao City mayor.

The discussions would be held soon “in a very well-defined manner, in the spirit of comity,” Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin disclosed in an interview with Reuters. The Philippine STAR headlined the news yesterday.

One may recall that early in his Malacañang stint, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. clearly asserted that his administration had no legal duty to comply with any obligation to the ICC or to support its proceedings. He banked on the ground that, upon Duterte’s officially withdrawing the country’s membership from the court – which took effect in March 2019 – the Philippines had yielded its treaty obligations under the Rome Statute.

Marcos Jr. was even quoted then as saying the ICC was a threat to the country’s sovereignty. Consequently, his administration would not help, in whatever manner, in the latter’s probe of drug killings and related crimes under ICC jurisdiction that could be deemed as crimes against humanity.

That position, of course, raised strong protests. Now, there seems to be a change in the wind. “Some people are trying to bridge the divide to bring us together, so we can sit at one table,” Remulla reportedly said. “There are certain areas we can cooperate,” he added, though emphasizing that “lines have to be drawn properly.”

Now Remulla is saying that cooperating with an international tribunal is permissible under Philippine law. In fact, he admitted that ICC representatives “have been going in and out of the country without us doing anything.” In fact, he has been told that these people have been in contact with the local human rights community.

But he waved off as “another question” the issue of the Philippines rejoining the ICC. He affirmed, however, that the Marcos Jr. regime is “starting to explore the limits of non-membership to the ICC and the extent of crimes committed prior to the country’s withdrawal.”

Although the government has been supposedly carrying out its own investigation on the drug-related killings, Remulla acknowledges that it that has not satisfactorily been carried out.

He conceded that the ICC’s work could help advance the probe: “We have to admit the shortcomings…We always want to do justice to everyone.”

Duterte, now approaching the age of 80, has persistently defended his war on drugs, which, during his campaign for the presidency, he had promised to finish within six months in the event he was elected to the office.

With the police generally denying direct participation in the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug users and pushers, the former president claimed that his order to them was to kill only in self-defense.

Testifying last November before the House of Representatives’ quad committee’s public hearings into his war on drugs, Duterte bragged that he had urged the ICC to “hurry up” on its investigation. “If I go to hell, so be it!” he even declared.

To that defiant, fatalistic stance, Marcos Jr. had commented that if Duterte wanted to be investigated, his administration would not block the ICC probers from entering the country. His regime, he added, would be obliged to comply with any international arrest warrant against Duterte that former senator Antonio Trillanes claimed had already been issued by the ICC.

Under the changed circumstances, if the ICC proceeds to hold the trial against Duterte and other co-accused over the drug killings and related crimes, the former president would go on record as the first Asian former head of state to face trial before the ICC chamber in The Hague.

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With Donald Trump’s second inauguration as the 47th president of the United States last Monday and the apprehension on display both in US political circles and media comments abroad, there’s an uneasy sentiment among some Filipinos that “over here, we’ve been through that” with our own former president. Of course, we’re a whole world away from the American situation. But we can sympathize.

I came across an incisive editorial by The Guardian, which I would like to share with our readers.

Some insights:

• Trump’s inaugural address “feigned conciliation but was, in reality, a rightwing call to arms against his enemies, rejecting the unity the ceremony represented.”

• The incoming president presented a grim picture of a country on its knees, that only he can revitalize. He declared two national emergencies, pledging to redeem “millions of criminal aliens” and “drill, baby, drill” for the liquid gold under our feet,” referring to oil.

• Where Theodore Roosevelt once inspired hope, Trump offered fear. His opening salvo of executive orders will accelerate the climate emergency, defy the US Constitution over birthright citizenship and reduce the scope of legal protections. The message was blunt: enemies at home and abroad, beware!

• Trump attempted to cast himself as a visionary heralding a transformative American era, but “his speech shouldn’t fool anyone.”

• The editorial calls Trump “a vain showman” whose first presidency had already “revealed him to be a politician who cloaked a fragile ego and dragged American democracy to the edge.”

The progressive leader Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democrat, came out with a scathing critique, not of what Trump had said, but of what he omitted or ignored:

• America’s health care system, according to Sanders, is “broken, dysfunctional and wildly expensive.”

• There are 800,000 homeless Americans and millions who spend 50 percent to 60 percent of their limited income on housing.

• There is more income and wealth inequality in America than ever before. The three wealthiest persons in the US own more wealth than the bottom half of the entire population; they all sat right behind Trump at the inaugural. “They couldn’t be happier.”