WHEN RODRIGO DUTERTE was arrested on the morning of March 11th, as he stepped off a plane in Manila, hundreds of supporters thronged outside the airbase to protest. Their hero, a former president of the Philippines, had been denied due process, they claimed.
It was an ironic complaint. Mr Duterte urged the police to commit thousands of extra-judicial killings when he was in office. In his winning election campaign in 2016, he told crowds that he would kill so many people that the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat on their bodies. As recently as November 2024, before a Senate committee, Mr Duterte admitted that he had ordered the killings, and made no apologies for it. He claimed that his hit squads only went after drug traffickers. But the dead received no trials; many were deemed guilty by suspicion. Officially, over 6,000 died; the ICC says the real total may be in the tens of thousands.
Mr Duterte was detained by Philippine officials acting on an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. They flew him to the Netherlands the same day. By the evening of March 12th, he was in the court’s custody.
His arrest highlights both the strengths and the weaknesses of international justice—mainly the weaknesses. On the one hand, a leader who ordered thousands of deaths without a shred of due process now faces trial, and perhaps a long jail term. That could make other thugs in high office think twice before committing similar outrages.
On the other hand, the case is only going ahead because the political winds in the Philippines have changed. Mr Duterte, who remained popular throughout his drug war, stood down because of term limits in 2022. He was succeeded by Ferdinand Marcos junior, the son of a former president, with Mr Duterte’s daughter, Sara, elected separately as vice-president. The dynastic alliance the pair formed kept Mr Duterte safe for a while, with President Marcos refusing to co-operate with the ICC. But then the two families fell out.
Mr Marcos’s foreign policy was one source of tension among many. Mr Duterte had pushed America away and sought closer relations with China. Mr Marcos did the opposite, calling out China’s bullying of Philippine vessels in the South China Sea. In June 2024 Sara Duterte resigned from the cabinet. In November she warned that she had arranged for President Marcos to be assassinated if she were herself killed. In February the lower house impeached her for making this threat. The Senate has yet to set a date for a trial.
The ICC pursues a noble aim: to prosecute individuals suspected of committing war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity or crimes of aggression, such as invading a neighbour. However, it is often hamstrung by politics, both national and global.
It generally lacks jurisdiction over countries that have not signed up to it. So it cannot do anything about China’s persecution of the Uyhgurs in Xinjiang, for example. And since Mr Duterte pulled the Philippines out of the treaty underpinning the court halfway through his time in office, it can only prosecute him for alleged crimes committed before that date.
The ICC has no powers of coercion. It cannot arrest people without the co-operation of the country where they are, which is often refused. So far its successful prosecutions have all been of Africans, and mostly warlords rather than government officials. The court is trying hard to bring justice to other parts of the world, but it is not easy.
When it issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine, one of his henchmen threatened “a surgical application of a hypersonic [missile]” on the courthouse in The Hague, adding: “So, judges, look carefully to the sky.” The case file on the ICC website notes helpfully that Mr Putin is still “at large”. (Nonetheless, the arrest warrant has made it harder for him to travel: he could not attend a BRICS summit in South Africa in 2023, since his hosts, as ICC members, would have been obliged to arrest him.)
Under Donald Trump, America has grown dramatically more hostile to the court. It has never signed up to the ICC, for fear that American soldiers overseas might be subject to politicised prosecutions. Moreover, Mr Trump has gone further than previous presidents. On February 6th he announced sanctions on the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, over what he called “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel”. Mr Khan had called for the arrest of three senior Hamas officials for murdering Israelis, and of two Israelis for alleged crimes in Gaza: Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant. The two Israeli cases are outstanding; the three Palestinian ones are moot, since the men in question have all been killed by Israeli forces.
Attacking the ICC makes America “look lawless and weak” argues Kelebogile Zvobgo of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington. But it is in keeping with the new mood in the White House and elsewhere. The long arm of international law can sometimes catch malefactors from medium-sized countries. But for now the big powers, and their clients, are largely out of reach. ■