‘Duterte’s lawyers, not VP Sara Duterte, should discuss ICC case’
Vice President Sara Duterte
INQUIRER PHOTO/LYN RILLON
MANILA, Philippines — Vice President Sara Duterte should stop making public comments about the case of her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and leave it to their lawyers instead, a lawyer accredited by the court said on Sunday.
The younger Duterte over the weekend questioned the widely reported figure of 30,000 drug war deaths during her father’s administration, saying the prosecution’s claims were far from the 181 pieces of evidence submitted to the ICC.
The former president is facing the charge of crime against humanity of murder in relation to his war on drugs.
READ: VP asks ‘Where’s the 30,000 dead?’; Conti says view is ‘simplistic’
“It will do well for the Vice President to leave [it] to her father’s lawyers to do the talking on the merits of the ICC case instead of spouting foul words that only boomerang and apply to her,” ICC-accredited lawyer Joel Butuyan told the Inquirer.
“The ICC case is not about proving the murder of 30,000 Filipinos but about the decision by her father in ordering police forces to use extrajudicial killing as a solution to the illegal drugs problem,” he said.
“The ICC case is not a prosecution against ordinary police and their agents who pulled the trigger that resulted in 30,000 murders. Instead, it is a prosecution against the monster masterminds who ordered triggers to be pulled in order to implement the mass murder of suspected drug personalities,” he pointed out.
Duterte’s message
The former president himself supposedly did not want his supporters and friends to meddle in his case—a message that the Vice President herself relayed to her father’s hundreds of Filipino supporters at a rally to mark his birthday on Friday at a park near the ICC detention center in The Hague.
The Vice President nonetheless continued addressing her father’s case in an ambush interview with reporters on the same day, daring the prosecution to identify the 30,000 drug war victims.
“You have to prove that there are 30,000 victims. So, how can you prove systematic killings of 30,000 victims if you do not have the names of 30,000 victims? So, where is the system there of killing thousands? Sorry. Ang bobo ’yung abogado nila (Their lawyers are stupid),” she said.
Based on official figures
Neri Colmenares, who also serves as counsel for the families of victims of extrajudicial killings in the drug war, said the Vice President “should know that the Rome Statute does not require a specific number to prove crimes against humanity.”
“If she thinks that her father cannot be convicted because he only ordered the killing of less than 30,000 people, then she is dead wrong,” Colmenares said.
“We challenge VP Duterte and her lawyers to use this ‘less than 30,000 deaths’ argument in the confirmation hearing if they really believe that failure to prove 30,000 deaths is not a crime against humanity,” he added.
He said the complaint that they had filed in the ICC listed 3,427 killed as of July 31, 2018, “because this was the number of victims killed as officially admitted by the PNP (Philippine National Police).”
The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency would later revise the figures to 6,353, he noted.
“Our complaint did not state any number other than that admitted by President Rodrigo Duterte’s PNP because, as lawyers, we want to base our complaint on official figures,” he said.
