P50M for a rock

Unless the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. can justify what critics see as its exploitation of International Criminal Court (ICC) actions against political foes, the public may exact its judgment at the ballot box.

The P50-million bounty on a sitting senator wanted by the ICC raises troubling questions.

The government has withdrawn from the court’s jurisdiction, yet it offers a reward for arresting a senator who has not been charged with any crime in the Philippines.

The contradiction is difficult to ignore: Why is the administration invoking the authority of a court it has abandoned while leaving the senator without domestic charges?

The Philippines joined the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, in 2011 under President Benigno Aquino III. That commitment was later repudiated, but questions of accountability and selective justice remain.

In 2018, after the ICC prosecutor opened a preliminary examination into the killings in Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, the then President announced that the country would leave, and the withdrawal took effect on 17 March 2019.

In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the country remains obliged to cooperate with ICC proceedings despite its withdrawal because the alleged crimes occurred while it was still a member.

That position, nonetheless, looks odd beside what other states do. The Trump administration treats the ICC as an illegitimate court and has moved from penalizing individual officials to sanctioning the court itself.

Russia and Israel ignore the intrusive court orders against their leaders.

The Philippines, meanwhile, left the court but still says it must honor its duties to the court, a stance that is hard to sustain without clear rules on how to meet those duties.

Marcos’ legal team leans on Republic Act (RA) 9851, the 2009 law on genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, which says officials may surrender a suspect to an international court.

The Solicitor General told the Supreme Court that the ICC warrant does not need a domestic court’s validation to be enforced, and the Justice Department ordered the police and the NBI to enforce it on 20 May.

Senator Ronald Dela Rosa’s lawyers argue that the ICC lost its authority when the country left and that no rules govern handing a citizen to the international tribunal.

Into that gap came the bounty. The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) pays rewards under circulars that list a Philippine court, a case number and a warrant for each wanted person.

A senator with none of these now carries a price, paid from intelligence funds meant for Philippine cases.

Even those who want Dela Rosa in The Hague should be uneasy about money doing the work that a judge’s order is supposed to do.

The Marcos regime must also confront a second question head-on: Why has no one accused before the ICC been charged in the Philippines?

The ICC is meant to be a court of last resort, which steps in only when a country is unwilling or unable to act. Murder has always been a crime under the Revised Penal Code, and RA 9851 has covered crimes against humanity for more than 15 years.

Several reasons are possible, and all point to clearing the way for an exile to The Hague, thus shaping the public perception of a partisan political act.

A real local trial might make the ICC case inadmissible and send the matter back to domestic courts. Whatever the cause, a country cannot say that it will never be a haven for impunity while it files no case of its own.

A Supreme Court ruling on the petitions pending since 11 March 2025, when the Marcos administration surrendered Duterte to the ICC and flew him to The Hague the same day, would help dispel public doubts about the legality of the government’s actions.

Congress could enact legislation specifying who reviews a foreign warrant, which court has jurisdiction, what rights the accused is entitled to, who may authorize a bounty for an arrest and from which fund it may be drawn.

Until such safeguards are in place, every arrest carried out under an ICC warrant risks being seen as another move to sideline political rivals ahead of the 2028 elections.