Probably much ado about nothing!

There is a storm of information coming in diverse form and content. Never have I seen such a deluge of reporting. Those appearing on social media though are perceptively more suffocatingly numerous than those reported in main stream media. The ratio is unimaginable. From these swirling reportage, however, I could discern two opposing sides engaged in a kind of brutal war. For purposes of candidness, let me declare that these are the Duterte and Marcos sides to include those that are posted by their blind supporters who may even be unknown to them. I am naming them in alphabetical order to demonstrate absence of preference.

The Dutertes. It is the beef of the Duterte side that firstly the arrest of former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte was in violation of his constitutional rights. Many such posts even had to quote the very specific provisions of the Constitution breached as if written in copious memoranda required by courts of law. According to the social media as presented by the Duterte side, the former president was denied due process of law. The written expositions may be laconic but certainly they carry the admirable weight contained in the writings of constitutional law scholars. When all of these posts are reduced to a language that is most easily understandable to the less learned, they say that past President Duterte was kidnapped.

Secondly, the social media accounts coming from the Duterte side claim that the Philippine government surrendered its sovereignty to the International Criminal Court (ICC) when it delivered the person of the former president as an arrested individual following an unlawful. To make their accusation graphic, they employed the words “extraordinary rendition” which term means a controversial practice involving the state-sponsored abduction and transfer of individuals, particularly suspected terrorists, to third countries for detention and interrogation. which is generally considered a violation of international law.

It is also the position of the Dutertes that the Philippines has already withdrawn its membership from the ICC and so it has no jurisdiction to investigate the accusations of alleged crimes committed in the “war against drugs”, arrest and eventually try him.

The Marcos government. Without meaning to trivialize the position of the administration of President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr., let me attempt to simplify it. The administration asserted that a kind of warrant of arrest was duly issued by the ICC. It was entrusted for service to the International Criminal Police Organization, more popularly known as the Interpol and since our government is a member of this international body, we have a legal obligation to cooperate.

The different social media platforms have lately shown the holding of mass actions both here in the Philippines and abroad. There was one such FB post of a rally organized in Netherlands and participated by our countrymen who came from other countries. I noticed though that their main cry is to force the government to take actions in order to bring back Duterte to our shores. In other rallies such cry had been coupled with demands for President Marcos to resign from the presidency under hints of a threat to oust him the way his father, Da Apo, was ousted.

In my column last Sunday, I opined that the arrest of Duterte (and his “extraordinary rendition” to ICC) is now a “fait accompli.” As an accomplished fact, it cannot be reverted. I even express the view that our Supreme Court will just dismiss the Habeas Corpus case filed by the Dutertes simply because it cannot order the ICC to produce the body of our former president. The Marcos administration is without any legal tool to repatriate Duterte. In fine, the noise generated by conflicting social media reporting is to quote William Shakespeare much ado about nothing.