A lawyer and an overseas Filipino worker have asked the Supreme Court to stop the entry of personalities connected with the International Criminal Court (ICC), or order their immediate deportation if they are already here in the country to probe the bloody anti-illegal drug campaign of the Duterte administration.
Fernando Perito filed the petition before the Regional Trial Court of Calbayog City as a member of the legal profession and was joined by OFW Joseph Forrosuelo.
In their 12-page petition, they sought the issuance of a preliminary injunction barring ICC investigators and officers from entering the country to investigate the killings related to the past administration’s anti-illegal drug war.
Perito argued that any investigation, prosecution, trial, and resolution of cases concerning the anti-illegal drug war is governed by the provisions of the country’s Constitution, existing laws, and criminal procedures.
“With all our laws and rules, policies in order, are we to succumb to international pressure to ignore our existing laws, rules, and procedures, simply because that international court is so powerful?” the petition stated.
The petitioners challenged human rights advocates to prove their claim that there were at least 30,000 killings during anti-illegal drug operations by filing complaints before the country’s courts.
“The country and our government should not entertain any propaganda, outcry, or calls allowing any prosecutor for that ICC to resume investigation, particularly in the alleged culpability of a very protective President Duterte to his people,” the petitioners stressed.
The petitioners claimed that accusations of extrajudicial killings and human rights violations against Duterte were just “exaggerated hyperboles.”
The petitioners also pointed out that the country has ceased to be a member of the ICC, thus, its members should no longer be allowed entry into the country.
“To allow any prosecutor, investigator or any representative coming from ICC to enter the Philippines with their purpose in any event is but to investigate, gather sham evidence and stories that were never brought before courts of justice here in the Philippines, cause grave and irreparable damage to our democracy and on the justice system,” the petition read.
“They would create unreasonable havoc in our form of dispensing justice to all Filipinos,” it said.
The petition was filed even as the Department of Justice (DOJ) had repeatedly maintained that the ICC had lost jurisdiction over the country following its withdrawal as a member state has not changed.
Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra maintained that the government has no legal duty to cooperate with the ICC in its investigation of the drug war since it can no longer exercise jurisdiction after the effectivity of the country’s withdrawal from the ICC in 2019.
Former President Rodrigo Duterte announced on March 14, 2018 the Philippines’ withdrawal of its ratification of the Rome Statute, a United Nations (UN) treaty creating the ICC.
Duterte cited the ICC’s “baseless, unprecedented, and outrageous attacks” against him and his administration as the reason for his withdrawal as a state party.
In a ruling issued in March 2021, the Supreme Court junked the petitions seeking to declare null and void Duterte’s unilateral decision to withdraw from the Rome Statute of the ICC.
The decision acknowledged that the judiciary has enough powers to protect human rights, contrary to speculations raised by petitioners.