Former President Rodrigo Duterte’s defense counsel, Nicholas Kaufman, was unduly compelled to declare “a big lie” the assertion of victims’ representatives Joel Butuyan and Kristina Conti on the restriction on the identification documents of victims under the Victims Participation and Reparations Section (VPRS) of the International Criminal Court.

It’s axiomatic that the intellectual tolerance threshold may have been breached. A lie ought not to be passed off as the truth for its purveyors to gain an off-court advantage.

Kaufman’s denial was carried across all newspapers, clarifying that the “rejection of such proposal never happened,” thereby belying Butuyan’s and Conti’s claim that the former was restricting the victims’ participation by limiting the type of ID documents they could present.

Quite tactlessly, Butuyan was quoted as saying, viz: “They never asked the victims for IDs before they decided to shoot and kill in cold blood.”

It’s of little moment how any deliberations transpired in the ICC that would have given rise to such conflicting claims, which largely originated from the victims’ Filipino lawyers, who circulated somewhat fabled lies to the press to gain media blitz. It’s far from the zeitgeist of humanitarian law espoused by the Rome Statute.

If we roll out the statements made by either Butuyan or Conti as highlighted in news accounts, it would not be difficult to understand their frame of mind, how they scope the legal battle early in the game, their premature desire to play the victim card on behalf of their clients. Resorting to theatrics, they huffily declared, “The kind of IDs demanded by Kauffman are badges of wealth and privilege in the Philippines.”

Couched in rather obscene language, Butuyan went as far as to say, viz: “Mr. Kaufman’s comment on the IDs of the victims comes from someone who obviously has no knowledge at all of the Philippine situation. It comes from someone who is totally ignorant of the kind of people who were mass murdered by his client, Mr. Duterte” (GMA News Online).

In like vein, Conti quipped, thus: “Their suggestion to produce passports is anti-poor, as only the socially mobile have the luxury to avail of cross-country travel.”

All these unflattering remarks unrestrictedly ventilated to the local press may earn them — individually or mutually — comparative points, albeit any serious observer will have to regard this as culture-bound. Are the victims’ representatives trying to hit two birds with one stone?

In defending their clients, the oft-quoted Butuyan even argued, viz: “For them to be refused recognition as victims of the murderous Mr. Duterte, because of their lack of government-issued IDs, is to make them suffer a grave injustice twice over.” Such statements have all the footprints of skilled propagandists or agitators out to sow confusion and distrust of the ICC and its legal processes.

Any ICC-accredited lawyer ought to be more circumspect of the role of the Court to investigate and prosecute individuals for serious crimes of international concern like “genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.” Even under the simplest definition of these criminal concepts, it seems far-fetched that genocide ever was the handiwork of Tatay Digong.

Neither were there war crimes which would have been best exemplified by the Marawi siege. Just what crimes against humanity could spring from official state policy against the festering drug menace that afflicted even the police force that must enforce the law?

A crime of aggression could have been graphically demonstrated if, for example, the Philippine Coast Guard sank Chinese ships within the country’s exclusive economic zone. What Kaufman pointed out is that “relying on what the country’s Social Security System requires for IDs to be verified in the Philippines” is an observation made with the VPRS.

Verily, there’s no forgetting Kaufman’s categorically stating that Butuyan and Conti “were not accepted at this present moment in time to be representatives of the victims; rather the OPCV (Office for Public Counsel for the Victims) is the unit dedicated to representing the victims of the ICC.”