MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute is not a free pass for President Duterte to escape the judicial mantle of the International Criminal Court (ICC) or evade accountability for the deaths of thousands of alleged victims of his brutal war on drugs, according to former ICC Judge Raul Pangalangan.
But Pangalangan, the first Filipino to sit as judge in the international tribunal, conceded that the ICC does not have its own law enforcers to implement arrest warrants against individuals indicted for committing crimes against humanity.
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Speaking in an online forum on Friday, he said Article 127 of the Rome Statute—the international treaty that created the ICC—clearly stated that the withdrawal of a state-party did not excuse it from cooperating with the court’s processes.
A day before she stepped down last week, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that she had requested the ICC pretrial chamber to open a formal investigation of charges of crimes against humanity involving murder against Duterte in his war on drugs.
Malacañang said Duterte would not cooperate with the probe since the Philippines had already bolted from the treaty in 2019.
“When [we] signed the statute [in 2011], we agreed to the terms laid down in the statute,” Pangalangan said.
“Article 127 of the statute says that the court retains jurisdiction even after the withdrawal. It retains jurisdiction over all crimes committed in its territory while it was still a member of the Rome Statute,” he said. “For me, that question is fully satisfied by Article 127.”
