Lawyer Jude Sabio has filed a 78-page “communication” to International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, asking him to prosecute President Rodrigo Duterte and 11 other officials for “mass murder or extrajudicial executions constituting crimes against humanity.” According to Sabio, the war on drugs has caused the death of 1,400 in Davao City and more than 8,000 across the country.
Reactions have been swift. No less than the New York Times has supported Sabio’s move, with a scathing editorial calling on the world to condemn Duterte. “This is a man who must be stopped,” the Times editors said.
But many point to the timing of Sabio’s action, saying it was meant to embarrass Mr. Duterte as he hosts this week’a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The Philippines is this year’s chairman of the regional bloc.
Palace officials are livid. Solicitor General Jose Calida, himself one of the 11 other officials mentioned for promising to defend policemen accused of summary killings if the killings were committed as part of the war on drugs, says he will initiate a disbarment case against Sabio for filing baseless suits before the ICC.
Calida also described Sabio as a compliant stooge of the yellow cult.
Senator Panfilo Lacson, meanwhile, said the complaint would amount to nothing if Sabio’s case would rest on the testimony of self-confessed assassin Edgar Matobato, whom he represented during the Senate hearings on alleged extra-judicial killings.
But all these reactions may be premature—as Sabio’s request might be, according to lawyer Emil Maranon III, in a piece published in Rappler.
Maranon says Sabio faces the hurdle of proving the unwillingness or inability of the government to prosecute Duterte. There has been no impeachment trial yet on the matter, and neither unwillingness nor inability has been established. There has been no unjustifiable delay. Moreover, the principle of complementarity says that crimes must first be prosecuted domestically before they can be elevated to the ICC.
The legal and political noise regarding the haling of Mr. Duterte to the ICC can be silenced by the Court itself, which sooner or later is bound to say whether it can even act on Sabio’s “communication”—only a state entity can file a complaint, according to rules—in the first place.
Only the ICC can establish whether said rules apply to what Sabio has raised, and eventually whether the charges against Mr. Duterte and his officials have basis. It must not matter whose lawyer, or whose stooge, Sabio is—if he is anybody’s stooge at all.
We trust that the Court in all its sobriety, disinterestedness and legal brilliance, will weed out these confounding factors and look at the case for what it is.