The camp of drug war victims asserted Sunday that the Senate cannot provide absolute refuge for “murderers” amid reports of a looming International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant against Senator Ronald de la Rosa.

Lawyer Kristina Conti, also an ICC assistant to counsel, maintained such a conviction in response to reports that the Senate will block De la Rosa’s potential arrest within the chamber’s grounds, invoking “institutional courtesy.”

“The Senate should not protect murderers or even the corrupt,” Conti said in Filipino in an interview. “The protection that will be provided by  the Senate is not arbitrary.”

The Senate also provided sanctuary to former senators Leila de Lima (2017) and Antonio Trillanes IV (2018), both fierce critics of then-president Rodrigo Duterte, to evade arrest for drug trafficking and rebellion, respectively.

De Lima spent overnight in the Senate premises but surrendered a day after, while Trillanes turned himself in to authorities after three weeks. 

Senate President Tito Sotto stated that they will not allow any sitting senator to be arrested in the chamber’s premises “as a matter of institutional courtesy.” But claimed that any developments that may occur outside the Senate are “no longer our concern.”

Given the situation, Conti contended that, “There is no explicit rule that prohibits police from entering the Senate to arrest people.”

“As long as Bato dela Rosa does not engage in the ICC process, whether it is submitting a motion to dismiss or a motion quash, he cannot just hide in the Senate forever,” Conti averred.

The alleged warrant against De la Rosa, announced by Ombudsman Boying Remulla over the weekend, has not yet been confirmed by Malacañang and the Department of Justice. 

But Conti believed in Remulla, taking into account his previous position as DOJ chief, enabling him to maintain connections with sources within the department.

Besides, Conti mentioned that an ICC warrant for De la Rosa is an open secret or long anticipated as early as former president Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest on 11 March. 

Generally, ICC documents, including warrants, are made public, according to Conti. However, the prosecution may request temporarily withheld from the public if they believe that doing so may jeopardize the warrant enforcement.

This is similar to the case of Duterte, whose warrant was only made public after he had been taken into custody and flown to The Hague, four days after the warrant was issued. 

The application for Duterte’s warrant was heavily redacted, but it has been speculated that Duterte’s former police chiefs, De la Rosa and retired police general Oscar Albayalde, may be next on the list. 

De la Rosa, who served as PNP chief from 2016 to mid-2018 before he was succeeded by Albayalde, who allegedly continued overseeing the summary killings, was named co-perpetrator of Duterte in the latter’s ongoing murder case for crimes against humanity before the ICC. 

The senator has long argued that the ICC has no business meddling in the Philippines, citing the country’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute—the tribunal’s founding treaty—in March 2019. 

But in September, De la Rosa retreated from his previous statements and boldly claimed that he’s “ready” for a potential arrest from the ICC.