ICC hands Marcos Jr a ready way to dispose of Duterte

The wheels have turned slowly, but international justice is finally apparently coming for former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte for his alleged lead role in rights abuses and crimes against humanity perpetrated during the previous government’s deadly war on drugs campaign.

Duterte has repeatedly denied any culpability for the killing spree that allegedly took tens of thousands of lives without due legal process. Last week, former police colonel Royina Garma told a parliamentary committee the former president had offered police officers up to US$17,000 to kill suspected drug users and dealers.

According to Garma, Duterte wanted to model his nationwide crackdown on drugs on the previous campaign he spearheaded as mayor of Davao City, in which payments and rewards were given to police officers who killed rather than arrested drug suspects.

The damning allegation has spurred new calls for the evidence to be handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which started investigating killings under Duterte’s government in 2017. Duterte told his officials not to cooperate with the ICC and famously threatened to feed its investigators to “crocodiles” if they entered the country.

The war on drugs was extremely popular according to various opinion polls and was Duterte’s policy centerpiece during his six-year tenure between 2016 and 2022. The war unleashed years of deadly anti-drug operations and vigilante violence that saw thousands of Filipinos killed, with some human rights groups claiming the figure could be as high as 30,000 people.

At the time, Duterte called for the “slaughter” of drug addicts and even offered to pay the legal fees of police officers accused of extrajudicial killings in carrying out the