Screenshot from the International Criminal Court streaming
MANILA, Philippines — Surrendering former President Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court (ICC) does not mean the Philippine judicial system is not working.
This was according to international law experts at a colloquium at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Law on Friday, March 14.
“It is not necessarily a full surrender to the court’s (ICC) processes and admission that nothing is happening. In fact, the court can recognize that the state is doing something on its own,” said Ross Tugade, a senior legal associate at the UP College of Law Institute of International Legal Studies.
“It’s not like the equivalent of us saying ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have a terrible judicial system. Why don’t you do the job for us, the job that we can’t do ourselves?’… [I]t is not necessarily an admission of failure,” said Raul Pangalangan, a retired judge of the ICC.
READ: Duterte’s arrest an affront to PH sovereignty – Sen. Bong Go
Long-time Duterte ally and Sen. Christopher “Bong” Go maintained on Thursday that the former president’s arrest was an attack on the country’s sovereignty and that the local judicial system was fully capable of handling domestic matters.
However, the experts at the colloquium said the ICC arrest and the functioning of Philippine courts were not mutually exclusive.
“Our courts are functioning but that’s just not how this played out because of other considerations and not because of how our judicial system is structured,” UP Law associate professor Michael Tiu Jr. said.
According to the ICC arrest warrant, it was necessary to arrest Duterte because he “appears to continue to wield considerable power” despite no longer being president and due to the “risk of interference with the investigations and the security of witnesses and victims.”
LIVE UPDATES: Rodrigo Duterte at The Hague
Duterte is facing a case at the ICC for crimes against humanity allegedly committed during his administration’s war on drugs.
In a press briefing following the arrest, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said it was the government’s commitments to the International Criminal Police Organization that drove the decision to serve the arrest warrant to Duterte on Tuesday.
READ: Marcos on Duterte’s arrest: ‘We have commitments to the Interpol’