Deceit unleashed

The defense team of former President Rodrigo Duterte has unveiled a strategy framing his surrender to the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the result of domestic political infighting allegedly orchestrated by the current government leadership.

Lead counsel Nicholas Kaufman, while withholding names, pointed to a top-level operation to have Duterte handed over to the ICC to face accusations of crimes against humanity.

The weak showing of the administration’s Senate slate in the recent midterm elections has reinforced the defense’s narrative — that the public is disgruntled with the ongoing political feud, which has escalated with Duterte’s detention at The Hague and Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment.

The defense posits that these successive developments are products of political vindictiveness, designed to clear the path for the incumbent’s 2028 ambitions.

Kaufman framed the ICC case as rooted more in internal political rivalries than in a legitimate pursuit of justice.

Alleging that the current leadership is behind the campaign to facilitate Duterte’s surrender, the defense seeks to invoke the ICC’s lack of jurisdiction, likely through the principle of complementarity.

This principle limits the ICC’s role to cases in which a state is unwilling or unable to genuinely prosecute crimes domestically.

Outlined in Article 17 of the Rome Statute, the complementarity principle defines the ICC as a court of last resort. It intervenes only when national jurisdictions are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute crimes under its jurisdiction, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression.

Arguing that the case stems from political vendettas rather than genuine accountability for alleged crimes related to the war on drugs, the defense team aims to convince the ICC that the matter is a domestic issue and not a concern for international adjudication.

The defense wants to underline that the Philippines can handle the matter domestically — even through flawed or biased processes. This could prompt the ICC to question whether it should intervene in what appears to be a functioning national system.

The argument is grounded in the Philippine context, where political rivalries and factionalism are deeply entrenched, lending credibility to claims of persecution.

“The real prosecutor is actually in Manila, sitting in his palace. He’s the person who threw President Duterte over here to The Hague,” Kaufman said in an interview.

“He’s the person who used the Office of the Prosecutor as a tool in his political campaign — and it won’t work,” he added.

Kaufman described the result of the midterm elections — particularly the landslide win of Duterte as Davao City mayor — as a “finger to the eye of the people who threw him over here.”

“That’s the real point of the elections. There was a protest vote,” he said.

By highlighting the cutthroat nature of Philippine politics, Kaufman is casting the ICC as a potential tool of bad faith, presenting the tribunal with a novel challenge.

The Duterte case ventures into uncharted legal territory, asking whether politically motivated state cooperation undermines admissibility under Article 17.

The defense thus tests the strength of the complementarity framework and the ICC’s ability to maintain its mandate amid sophisticated political maneuvering.

Duterte’s defense taps into the political reality in the country to argue that the former president — who remains extremely popular among Filipinos — was forced into exile, with the ICC allegedly acting as a willing instrument.