The Hague in the hot seat: Duterte’s arrest amidst the ICC’s legitimacy crisis
The international community heralded Duterte’s arrest as a significant moment in the global pursuit of accountability for those in power almost immediately. Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, declared: “Duterte’s arrest on an ICC warrant is a hopeful sign for victims in the Philippines and beyond. It shows that suspected perpetrators of the most heinous crimes, including government leaders, can and will face justice, regardless of their location in the world. At a time when too many governments renege on their ICC obligations while others attack or sanction international courts, Duterte’s arrest is a huge moment for the power of international law.”
Others were more skeptical of the move. Nicholas Kaufman, Duterte’s lead lawyer, summarizes the argument, stating, “My only fear is that this court is starved of cases at the present moment and might be loath to let a case like this go, to slip through its hands.” The deprivation he describes appears to stem from criticisms currently dominating the narratives of the ICC’s work, as well as political scandals surrounding its high-level officials that threaten the Court’s legitimacy. Thus, his concern reflects a more profound unease not just about this case, but about the credibility that it offers to the ICC itself.
First, his claim echoes complaints from scholars and political leaders in Africa, where the idea that the Court turns a blind eye to perpetrators in other regions has seemingly gained traction across the continent. The dilemma stems from a perceived bias that has long haunted the Court, considering that almost all of its convictions and ongoing cases to date involve African nationals. Likewise, the apparent lack of investigations into Western powers or their allies may fuel the perception of a double standard. Together, these patterns may have even contributed to the ICC developing a reputation as a neo-imperial colonial court. Such criticisms have had real-world consequences: in 2017, Burundi became the first country to withdraw from the Court. In doing so, its presidential spokesperson, Willy Nyamitwe, left an impression of the accusation, saying, “The ICC has shown itself to be a political instrument and weapon used by the West to enslave.”
In the face of this legitimacy crisis, Duterte’s arrest might appear to challenge the ICC’s reputation for regional selectivity. As the first case involving an Asian ex-head of state, it seemingly offers an opportunity to mend Africa’s complex relationship with the Court. Still, this argument may gloss over the deeper issue: the bias critique is less about geography and more about power dynamics. The Philippines, like many African states, remains a developing member of the Global South. For those who view the Court’s credibility through the lens of enforcement parity, true legitimacy may thus only come when figures from global powerhouses—such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, both subjects of ICC arrest warrants—are also brought to trial. Until then, the arrest may not be considered a break from old patterns but a continuation under a new regional guise.
Defenders of the ICC reject this cynicism, stating, “It is well known that the application of international justice is uneven. There are many situations around the world that warrant ICC investigations and prosecutions. The solution, therefore, lies in more justice, not less.” Hart, a writer for the United Nations Association-UK, backs this claim by arguing that “If the ICC’s ever going to rid the criticism it receives, it will require that the international community grapple with these political realities, rather than simply demanding that the prosecutor look elsewhere. Rather than demanding that the ICC not pursue justice, primarily requested by Africans, in Africa, critics should be demanding that investigations elsewhere not be blocked.” In this sense, Duterte’s arrest appears a welcomed step towards accountability at a time wherein sanctions and warrants for ICC staff members by powerful states have admittedly “jeopardized” the very existence of the Court. The hope is that other cases of international justice will soon follow suit.
Aside from these criticisms, the rise of another controversy may complicate the conclusion of Duterte’s case and the overall work of the ICC. On 16 May 2025, ICC prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan QC communicated his decision to take administrative leave amidst an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct that the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) has been facilitating since November 2024. While the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) assured the continuity of its activities across all areas of work under the assumed leadership of Deputy Prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang, others saw it as another blow to their seemingly declining reputation.
Supporters rapidly capitalized on the controversy, painting a picture of an international witch hunt by a morally corrupt and deficient institution. In a Manila Times opinion piece, pro-Duterte columnist Rigoberto D. Tiglao argued that “Khan’s move to arrest Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and the latter’s defense minister was an attempt at drama to save his job as chief prosecutor after being confronted with sexual harassment allegations a few weeks earlier. Khan’s intense persecution of Duterte is obviously of the same motivation.” While such claims reflect a broader nationalist backlash, they also reveal how ICC leadership controversies risk undermining confidence in its legal process when cases intersect with high-profile geopolitical flashpoints. Overall, the timing of the arrest coinciding with the sexual misconduct allegations has fueled speculation that the Court may be deflecting from its own crises by aggressively pursuing headline-grabbing prosecutions.
Altogether, these critiques on selective enforcement and political scandal have reignited longstanding doubts about the ICC’s legitimacy as a truly impartial arbiter. The context of Duterte’s arrest puts a case supposedly about Crimes Against Humanity at the center of international politics, where questions of legal principle collide with accusations of geopolitical bias and institutional fragility. Far from being a straightforward pursuit of justice, the case may have thus become entangled in the broader crisis of confidence in the Court itself. Whether viewed as a step toward broader accountability or as a strategic deflection from the Court’s own controversies, Duterte’s arrest may have forced the ICC into the spotlight not just as a prosecutor of crimes but as a subject itself of global scrutiny.
Behind closed doors: The Marcos-Duterte rivalry and an ICC case gambit
As the case quickly garnered global scrutiny from The Hague, the execution of Duterte’s arrest also began to reveal a layered domestic narrative back in Manila. Understanding it, however, requires understanding the players and environment that plague politics in the Southeast Asian state.
As a democratic and republican presidential State, many consider the Philippines’ two most powerful families at present to be the Marcoses (as represented by Bongbong Marcos in the Presidency) and the Dutertes (as represented by Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio, Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter, in the Vice Presidency). The two political powerhouses joined forces in 2022, running under the widely popular UniTeam campaign alliance that “successfully pooled support from the largely pro-Marcos solid North and the Duterte heartlands of Mindanao—as well as the populous Metro Manila region” into the highest vote share gained by any presidential candidate since the 1969 re-election of Bongbong’s father, Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos Sr.
Upon their victory, the dream team’s strong alliance carried over into their administration. When the ICC reopened Duterte’s case in January 2023 following a series of deferral requests and temporary suspensions, Marcos Jr. immediately came to the defense of his predecessor. Constantly reiterating the state’s official stance of non-cooperation with the Court, he called the probe a threat to sovereignty. When the House of Representatives urged the government to cooperate with the Court by referring House Bill 1477 to its Committee on Justice in November of the same year, Vice President Sara Duterte released a statementechoing President Marcos Jr.’s very words and calling the ICC probe “patently unconstitutional” and “[degrading to the Philippines’] legal institutions.” From an outsider’s point of view, the Marcos-Duterte tandem appeared firmly united in its political leadership and its defense of the former president against international scrutiny.
Still, looks can be deceiving. Within their first year, cracks appeared in a supposedly solid alliance as Marcos Jr. reversed key policies of his predecessor. He overturned Duterte's pro-China stance, affirmed the repeatedly dismissed 2016 South China Sea arbitration ruling, proposed revived peace talks with communist rebels (rebuked even by the Vice President), and expressed openness to the previously questioned amendment of the 1987 Constitution. Most importantly, the two families parted ways on their once-solid stance on the issue central to the current article: the ICC case against Duterte. While the former president had withdrawn membership in 2018 after the Court's prosecutor announced its preliminary examination of his War on Drugs, Marcos Jr. said that reinstatement was “under study.” While not overtly confrontational, these policy shifts signaled a nuanced recalibration of the administration's direction. Slowly but surely, the seeds of conflict were being sown.
Eventually, those seeds sprouted into what political commentators began to call an all-out “open warfare” in 2024 due to speculation that Vice President Duterte was positioning herself for a 2028 presidential run(potentially against a candidate backed by the Marcos faction) amidst long-running hostilities between the families. Many trace the alliance’s public unraveling to January, when the former President Duterte called Marcos Jr. a “drug addict” in a seemingly striking escalation of events. The President hit back, saying his predecessor’s admitted medical-fentanyl use could be clouding his judgment. While Marcos Jr. assured that his relationship with the Vice President was "exactly the same" and that the UniTeam remained intact amidst all the fiery comments, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos expressed disdain for Sara Duterte’s apparent inability to defend her husband against allegedly scathing remarks made by her family despite “[running] together.” The latter responded by asserting that UniTeam was “only good for the 2022 polls” and resigned from her posts as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body in Marcos Jr.’s cabinet a week later.
By November 2024, the political rift between President Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte seemingly escalated from verbal confrontations to direct institutional clashes. It seemed to stem from the House of Representatives’ decision to cite the latter’s chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, for contempt during another unrelated investigation into the alleged misuse of confidential funds by the Office of the Vice President. Lawmakers accused Lopez of obstructing the probe by advising the Commission on Audit to disregard a subpoena for audit reports. In response, Sara Duterte claimed that she had contracted an assassin to kill Marcos Jr., his wife, and House of Representatives Speaker Martin Romualdez (the President’s cousin) if she is killed—a public threat that she warned was “no joke.” The President labeled the comment as a “criminal plot” and vowed to “fight it,” with Justice Undersecretary Jesse Andres supporting his claim by later stating that they would subpoena the Vice President to face an investigation. These confrontations culminated in February 2025 when the House of Representatives shockingly impeached Vice President Sara Duterte over the alleged assassination plot (among others), with Philippine law enforcement agencies even recommending filing criminal charges against her. As of 11 June 2025, however, the Senate referred the case back to the Housedue to legal questions, and the future of the impeachment remains unclear. While subtle jabs evolve into sharp critiques and carefully veiled tensions give way to public displays of discord, the once-unshakable UniTeam may have begun to fracture—not only before the eyes of Filipinos, but also on the global stage.
Bringing attention back to the core ICC case, nowhere may this rupture be more evident than in the seemingly competing narratives surrounding the arrest of the former President by Philippine authorities. In a press conference held immediately after the detainment, President Marcos Jr. claimed that the move came as a result of the Philippines’ “compliance [with] Interpol” as is “what the international community expects.” His remarks cast it not as a political move but as a reaffirmation of the Philippines’ commitment to its global obligations. In contrast, the Vice President published a statement that painted the arrest of her father as a “blatant affront to [Philippine] sovereignty” and a “[betrayal against] the very essence of…national dignity.” Her rhetoric evoked themes of foreign interference and national humiliation—long-standing touchpoints in the Duterte camp’s nationalist messaging.
After analyzing the situation, scholars began to suggest that the ICC case—initially rooted in questions of human rights and accountability—may have since become a proxy arena in the political war between the Marcos and Duterte factions. As the incumbent positions himself as a steward of international law, critics accuse him of consolidating his political dominance by outsourcing justice for political enemies through international courts. As the arrested former President portrays himself as a victim of political persecution, so too do critics accuse him of using the case to evade international accountability mechanisms and allegedly mobilize declining political support. Regardless of which political faction ultimately prevails, this alleged politicization raises uncomfortable questions about the capacity of international legal institutions to remain impartial when inserted into volatile domestic power struggles. Unfortunately, the spectacle surrounding Duterte’s arrest risks turning the ICC case into a symbolic battlefield where the lines between justice, politics, and propaganda grow increasingly blurred. In doing so, it may erode public confidence not only in domestic institutions but in the very promise of international accountability.
Beneath the noise, the names
Overall, Duterte’s ICC case exemplifies the most fundamental paradox in the field of international relations: the tension between law and politics. When the signing of the 1998 Rome Statute established the ICC, it marked the first time in history that sovereign states accepted the jurisdiction of a permanent international court to prosecute the most serious atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. Over the years, the Court has led the global fight to end impunity and, in many ways, has become the symbol of international justice itself. However, its work has (and remains) eroded by geopolitical tensions, institutional controversy, and domestic political maneuvering.
Duterte’s ICC case is no exception. As his trial gets caught in a crossfire of critiques on selectivity, political scandal, and dynastic warfare, it is easy to forget what, or rather who lies at its core: the thousands of Filipinos whose lives were shattered by the War on Drugs. Beyond the courtroom, there are grieving families still waiting for answers—mothers who lost sons due to extrajudicial killings, children who grew up without parents due to forced disappearances, and communities terrorized into silence due to systemic violence.
To date, only 204 victim representation forms (covering around 1,530 individuals and 1,050 families) have been submitted and found relevant by the ICC’s Victims Participation and Reparations Section. This number represents a small fraction of the more than 6,000 officially documented drug war deaths—and an even smaller one if estimates by human rights organizations are correct. Likewise, the prosecution of Duterte alone cannot suffice if the web of complicity among law enforcement and political allies remains largely intact. It becomes painfully clear, then, that even a historic case will not deliver total justice.
It was never going to. It was never meant to.
The ICC was created 27 years ago not to remedy every injustice, but to ensure that the most serious crimes never slip into oblivion. It insists that these atrocities happened, that they mattered, and that the world will not forget the victims. Despite institutional limits and political vulnerabilities, the Court remains one of the rare global forums that embody collective moral memory. In a system where law and politics often collide, this act of acknowledgment becomes a powerful form of resistance: an unyielding refusal to forget the human suffering behind atrocity. As the case gets overshadowed by sensational scandals and political strife, the world must firmly return its attention to the victims who lived—and continue to live—in a harsh, unforgiving crossfire.
