MANILA: A human rights lawyer said Monday he was not surprised over President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s remark that he would not cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s investigation into former President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war.
“It’s not surprising because his positions have always been a mix of hypocrisy and ignorance,” Ruben Carranza, senior expert of New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice, told ANC’s “Headstart”.
He said then-Sen. Marcos was among those who signed the Senate resolution ratifying the treaty establishing the ICC, which the President now claims is an “infringement on the Philippine sovereignty.”
“[It] shows that he does not seem to remember what he did in the past, which is of course a very Marcosian thing,” Carranza said.
Marcos’ claim that the international tribunal does not have jurisdiction over the Philippines also shows “ignorance,” he said.
Withdrawing from the ICC does not diminish the country’s responsibility in cooperating with the investigation, he added.
“He has many lawyers in his employ. He can always ask them to make that distinction between jurisdiction, which is the crimes that are covered by the ICC and the ICC has jurisdiction over those crimes, and what is complementarity or admissibility whether the ICC can investigate crimes against humanity committed in the Philippines in the drug war,” Carranza stressed.
Duterte pulled the Philippines out of the Hague-based tribunal in 2019, a year after the ICC began a preliminary probe into the crackdown.
The ICC said that while the Philippines’ withdrawal from the Statute took effect on March 17, 2019, the court “retains jurisdiction with respect to alleged crimes that occurred on the territory of the Philippines while it was a State Party, from 1 November 2011 up to and including 16 March 2019.
The tribunal has authorised the reopening of an inquiry into the war on drugs.
Officially, over 7,000 were killed in Duterte’s “war on drugs” but rights group say that up to 30,000 may have been killed, some innocent victims, and that corruption was rife among security forces that acted with impunity.
Carranza noted the ICC prosecutor has yet to identify anyone who is under investigation for the drug war.
This, after 19 lawmakers filed resolution at the House of Representatives calling for the “unequivocal defence” of Duterte.
He also said the ICC could continue its investigation even without the Philippine government’s cooperation.
“But it raises a larger question of whether these people in fact see themselves as guilty and therefore unwilling to face accountability for their crimes,” Carranza said.
