Marcos govt sends stronger signal that ICC can conduct probe on Duterte drug war

By Beting Laygo Dolor, Contributing Editor

The Marcos administration continued to send stronger signals last week that should cause former president Rodrigo Duterte and some of his officials sleepless nights.

Previously the government said it would not allow the International Criminal Court (ICC) to continue its investigation on the Duterte regime’s bloody war on drugs. The door was opened slightly when it was announced investigators of the Court would be allowed to enter the Philippines but would not necessarily cooperate with it.

More importantly, such bodies as the Human Rights Commission and former senator Leila de Lima’s camp would not be prevented from working with the ICC, even as both the legislature and the executive departments consider rejoining the global court.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr himself appeared to have softened his stand on the ICC. Earlier this year, he said, “the Philippines has no intention of rejoining the ICC.”

Last month, however, he told local media: “Should we return under the fold of the ICC? That’s again under study. So we’ll just keep looking at it and see what our options are.”

Various elected and executive officials have said that the decision to rejoin the world court belonged to the president and the president alone.

In the House of Representatives, which is headed by Marcos’s cousin and Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, three separate resolutions were filed by three sets of congressmen asking the government to assist in the ICC investigation. This was followed by a similar resolution filed in the Senate by minority Sen. Risa Hontiveros.

Instead of ignoring the resolution as before, Speaker Romualdez allowed the House to allow the resolutions to proceed, paving the way for floor debates in the near future.

Marcos is seen to be under pressure from the international community to either have the Philippines rejoin the ICC, or to at least cooperate with the Court’s investigators.

One pressure point could be the much needed loans from global lenders to fund some of the country’s big ticket projects which China committed to fund but has not delivered.

Specifically, three massive railway projects which China committed to both fund and build is now looking for foreign partners to provide the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to continue.

The Transportation department said last month that it was looking for other global lenders to replace China.

Global lenders such as Japan and the EU prefer to extend loans to countries which are ICC members as a safeguard in the event that the funded projects encounter legal problems.

There is also the matter of the victims of Duterte’s drug war, which the government has failed to investigate.

The ICC said their probe was necessary because the families of the victims have no one else to turn to.

The ICC has been likened to the Nuremberg court which investigated leaders of the Nazi movement of Germany during World War ll. Until that time, no court could try war crimes, specifically, the Nazi officials who slaughtered millions of Jews in the Holocaust.

Then president Duterte ordered the Philippines to officially leave the ICC, despite lack of Senate concurrence. The country’s membership in the world court was approved by a two-thirds vote of the Philippine Senate, which at now the time included President Marcos.

It remains unclear if the current Senate must again vote on membership, although former Senate president Franklin Drilon opined that all the was needed was for the Marcos administration to retract the country’s exit through a presidential decree.