Duterte denies dropping plea vs ICC prosecutor

Nicholas Kaufman —SCREENGRAB FROM ICC VIDEO

MANILA, Philippines — Contrary to earlier reports, former President Rodrigo Duterte has not withdrawn his plea to disqualify the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) because of his alleged conflict of interest and bias.

British-Israeli lawyer Nicolas Kaufman, head of Duterte’s legal team, said they sought the disqualification of ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan after it was made aware of the “true extent of Khan’s conflict and bias.”

Kaufman argued that Khan had “hidden materials concerning his former representation from the court, including the fact that he had targeted the former president as the first among several worthy of prosecution back in 2018.”

Khan disclosed to the ICC on March 6 that he served as a pro bono lawyer for the drug war victims, but he said the role was limited only to reviewing the submission asking his predecessor, former ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, to open an investigation into Duterte’s deadly antidrug war.

Out of context

Kaufman clarified on Sunday, however, the Philippine media reports that quoted an initial filing the defense made in April, shortly before Khan went on leave of absence pending an investigation by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services of the sexual misconduct charge against him.

Kaufman, at the time, told the pretrial court he found “no ostensible reason to doubt the prosecutor’s impartiality or his assertions that he is not conflicted on account of his former representation of [redacted].”

Karim Khan —REUTERS

“At the time, the defense relied on what is termed ‘the presumption of prosecutorial regularity,’ which has now been rebutted,” Kaufman told the Inquirer on Sunday.

Khan, for his part, said the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) continued gathering evidence from various sources. The investigation and review of the evidence was led by a team of lawyers from the OTP, supervised directly by a deputy prosecutor, not him

The obligations of a prosecutor are “entirely different from those of a legal team” and that they play “entirely different roles,” he said.

Khan said that there should be no presumption that his past role would result in partiality toward the evidence at hand, which he noted “significantly deepened” in scope over the last seven years.

Duterte was arrested by the International Criminal Police Organization in March and flown to The Hague, where he remains in detention at the ICC facility in the Scheveningen Penitentiary Complex. /cb