ICC judge chides Duterte’s counsel for refusing to join in trial data reduction

MANILA, Philippines—Trial Chamber (TC) III Judge Joanna Korner of the International Criminal Court chided the defense team of former President Rodrigo Duterte for its purported refusal to cooperate with the prosecution.

This pertains to the prosecution panel’s active proposals to reduce evidentiary clutter and volume of legal documents.

The proposeals were presented during the fourth status conference of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) TC III.

There was a discussion on handling a massive data set containing official records from the Philippine National Police (PNP), government accomplishment reports, and documentation on the deaths during Duterte’s “war on drugs.”

Senior Trial Lawyer Julian Nicholls from the prosecution presented proposals to streamline the case file.

He said that by entering into stipulations on official record counts, the court could eliminate 42,511 documents, and reduce the formal evidence list by 6,863 items.

Nicholls offered the following compromises:

• Stipulating that official PNP reports categorize virtually all the killings as “justified self-defense.”
• Bringing in a joint independent expert to audit and count the documents together.
• Inviting defense lawyers into the prosecution’s offices for a guided review over a few hours or a full weekend to demonstrate the methodology step-by-step.

However, Nicholls said the defense rejected every proposal.

“They wouldn’t do that,” Nicholls told the bench, “saying ‘I won’t accept this number. I need to read every page myself…'”

“They don’t want to do that because then, they will see that the number is accurate, and then, they won’t be able to say there’s this huge problem that’s going to derail everything,” the senior trial lawyer said.

Judge Korner addressed the defense team: “Mr. (Peter) Haynes (Duterte’s lead counsel), I simply don’t understand why it is not possible for you to take up the prosecution’s offer…”

“It would seem to me, and it seems to us, that the prosecution is making all attempts to assist you in this, and you are refusing it,” Korner observed.

The defense argued that the prosecution had the document for five years, and yet, these papers have not been reviewed by an analyst or a lawyer.

“Its the argument we’ve made all the way through. It is being sidetracked by references to external material,” Haynes told the judge.

“But that is the reality of it, and it is dropped on us, and we have to go through it,” the defense counsel expressed his view.

He believes that the prosecution was trying to force the defense to agree to facts it could not legally prove from its official evidence list. 

Haynes said that the data set—which sits largely under Rule 77 material—contained non-drug-related homicides, such as domestic disputes and workplace murders.

The defense counsel insisted that processing the 35,000+ pages properly will take a dedicated team over a year.

Rule 77 of the ICC Rules of Procedure and Evidence (RPE) requires prosecutors to share any evidence in their possession with the defense, so the defense can independently inspect it, investigate leads, and build their client’s case.

For his part, Haynes accused the prosecution of relying on artificial intelligence (AI), rather than human review, in violation of ethical legal duties.

“We haven’t got the resources to go through 35,000 pages… to find all the cases in which these things were properly investigated,” he maintained,

Haynes described the material as having been “literally dumped on us.”

Nicholls firmly pushed back against the AI statements, calling them “completely untrue.”

He clarified that analysts had spent months manually reviewing the data set, page by page, to separate actual police operations from unrelated homicides.

Responding to Haynes’ workload complaint, Judge Korner said: “Let me say, I don’t think it is [a breach of duty].”

“I think what you’re being asked to do is, firstly, the prosecution offering to assist you with the fruits of their labors, and adding on anything that you want to do searching these documents yourself…,” the judge explained.

“And so far, as I understand it, you haven’t taken advantage of that,” the judge told the defense team of Haynes. /apl