The prosecution has considered expanding the International Criminal Court (ICC) charges against former President Rodrigo Duterte beyond murder and include other forms of crimes, such as unlawful detention, sexual violence, and torture.

A lawyer of the alleged war on drugs victims posited that the evidence acquired by the prosecution is substantial enough for Duterte’s case to proceed with a full-blown trial on the crimes against humanity case.

This includes, among others, a myriad of clips from his briefings and interviews where he publicly declared giving marching orders to police to kill drug suspects.

The expansion of the charges, however, may indicate uncertainty in pressing the case ahead of the 23 September confirmation of charges at the international tribunal.

The counsel of the family of drug war victims on Monday called for the inclusion of charges of illegal detention, sexual violence, and torture against former president Rodrigo Duterte on top of the murder charges, ICC-accredited lawyer Joel Butuyan said.

The confirmation hearing is one of the crucial stages in ICC proceedings because this is when the magistrates decide whether the case against an accused has enough merit to proceed to a full trial. A case could also be dismissed at this early stage if the judges find a lack of substantial evidence from the prosecutors.

Deferment an option

Another possibility is that the ICC judges could defer the trial to order the prosecution to gather additional evidence to include charges of illegal detention, sexual violence, and torture against Duterte, according to Butuyan.

“In the range of crimes committed during the drug war, the most common is actually illegal imprisonment, illegal detention. That’s almost half a million,” Butuyan said in an interview.

“The maximum estimate for murder is 30,000, but for illegal imprisonment, the [victims] were almost half a million. So for me, illegal detention, illegal imprisonment should be included.”

Duterte was arrested on 11 March in Manila on an ICC warrant, facing a single charge of murder for his role as an indirect co-perpetrator in the drug war killings waged by his administration.

Apart from this, the erstwhile leader had repeatedly told a congressional hearing last year that he encouraged police to provoke drug suspects to fight back as a pretext to kill them.

“You can really see the orchestration, that the orders are really coming from Duterte. So the evidence against him is substantial, “ Butuyan averred. “It’s just a matter of whether it’s murder or [unlawful] imprisonment.”

Article 7 of the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty, outlines the criminal offenses that constitute crimes against humanity. This includes murder, torture, rape, enforced disappearance of persons, and other inhumane acts intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to the body, or to the mental or physical health of the victims, among others.

It defines enforced disappearance as an arrest, detention, or abduction conducted by law enforcers who refuse to give information or the whereabouts of the arrested persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time.