OPINION | ACADEMIA: Why the Philippines needs dedutertefication What the Philippines needs is a genuine moral reckoning: in schools, in media, in families, in politics.
A relative of one of the victims of extrajudicial killings of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterteʼs drug war cries next to the urn of her son on Feb. 20 during the inurnment rites at the Shrine of Healing (Dambana ng Paghilom) at a cemetery in Caloocan, Metro Manila. (AFP/Ted Aljibe)
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OPINION ACADEMIA’
A fter listening to human rights lawyer Joel Butuyan’s opening speech at the International Criminal Court (ICC) last week during the confirmation of charges against former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, I felt something stir inside me, something between grief and fury that I have carried for years. In his powerful speech, the common legal representative for the victims of the “drug war” denounced the virus of impunity that Duterte spread across the Philippines, infecting Filipinos to the point that they could no longer discern right from wrong, evil from good. Butuyan provided the context that this moment desperately needed, not just for the hearing, but for this entire saga of Duterte-era atrocities that scarred our nation. He named the disease. He described the rot. And sitting in that cold, somber gallery, I felt every word land like an accusation against a country that still hasn’t fully reckoned with what it allowed to happen. I was unsettled because I knew exactly how Butuyan felt. I know exactly where that outrage comes from, because I have lived inside it for years. The toll of Duterte’s “drug war” and his Davao Death Squad has overwhelmed me over the years and decades, as it has so many others like myself, activists, journalists, lawyers, who have spent careers documenting Duterte’s depravity while the rest of the world looked away, and while too many of our own countrymen cheered. We did not document these horrors from a distance. We were there. We saw what was done to people. We know their names. Beside me in the public gallery sat photojournalist Raffy Lerma, one of the people who bore unflinching witness to the killing fields Duterte created. When Duterte’s lawyer, Nicholas Kaufman, made the cynical move to discredit Lerma’s “Pietà”-like photograph, a devastating image of a wife cradling her husband, shot dead by police in Pasay, which the Inquirer ran on its front page in 2016, I instinctively reached over and placed my hand on his back. Both of us had our heads bowed, as if in prayer. We were mourning. Not just the violence visited upon so many Filipinos at Duterte’s direction, but now, in real time, we were mourning the brazen lies being deployed in a court of law to defend that violence.
Carlos Conde (The Jakarta Post) PREMIUM ANN/Philippine Daily Inquirer/The Hague Tue, March 3, 2026
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