Rubio reshapes ICC debate

The argument was instantly recognizable to Filipinos. It echoed the then Duterte administration’s position rejecting ICC jurisdiction — that was dismissed by many at the time as a legal impediment to a president facing scrutiny.

The comparison, though, is not exact.

The US never ratified the Rome Statute and insisted the ICC never acquired jurisdiction over Americans at all. The Philippines voluntarily ratified the treaty, remained a member for years, and withdrew only in 2019 — the reason the ICC maintained jurisdiction over crimes committed while the country still belonged to it.

Washington argues that it never signed the contract. Manila argued, until Marcos’ about-face, that it should have been released from one it had already signed. Not the same argument, even if they sounded alike in Rubio’s mouth.

That is the legal distinction. The political one is more interesting, and cuts uncomfortably for everyone. It would be naïve to assume Washington’s concerns end with Americans. The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, proof it will pursue sitting or former heads of state.

Rubio’s warning reads as a marker that no future American president should ever fall within its reach. The same selective logic is visible closer to home, and undercuts Manila’s claim to the moral high ground.

Marcos once stood where Rubio now stands. In January 2024 he said the Philippines would “not lift a finger” to help the ICC, calling it a threat to sovereignty. By November he’d softened to “we will not block” an investigation. By early 2025, Philippine authorities were executing the ICC’s arrest warrant for Duterte through Interpol.

The Palace calls this a compliance with a legal obligation. It is worth noting that the obligation became easier to honor once honoring it also weakened Marcos’ strongest rival — Sara Duterte, the 2028 frontrunner, whose impeachment trial unfolds in the Senate at the very time her father sits in a cell in The Hague.

None of that proves orchestration, and it shouldn’t be asserted as though it does. But the sequence is close enough to make the government’s own sovereignty rhetoric hard to take at face value — the trouble with sovereignty as a governing principle rather than a legal one.

Rubio invoked it to shield Americans from prosecution; the Dutertes to shield their father. The Marcos administration invoked it, then quietly retired it once it served its own interest. A principle every side reaches for only when convenient isn’t a principle. It’s a tool.

That doesn’t mean Rubio’s underlying question disappears. Who decides when a country’s justice system has failed — institutions answerable to that country’s voters, or judges thousands of miles away whose authority rests on a treaty rather than the people’s sovereign will?

That question is real, and survives the posturing on every side.

Rubio’s speech did not settle it in America’s favor. It made clear no government gets to invoke sovereignty selectively and still claim to defend a principle — not Washington pressuring allies to fall in line; not the Dutertes who call the court illegitimate only once it turned on them; not Malacañang, which discovered its “obligations” the moment discharging them became convenient.

This was never simply about Rodrigo Duterte. It is about whether any government’s respect for sovereignty survives contact with its own self-interest — and so far, it does not.