“That Senate hearing was a legal disaster for him.”
Truth telling is good for the country, especially for the victims’ families. It is rare that we can have this soon after a human rights catastrophe.
Aside from being able to get the facts together, there is a catalytic effect in this truth telling. We have not yet achieved justice but it gives us hope that this can in fact be achieved.
As a result of these investigations, the filing of court cases is no longer a distant reality and the perpetrators made to answer for their crimes.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is the preferred venue for a criminal trial because it is quite advanced in the process already. Because of the prevailing political realities, the administration of Marcos might just decide to cooperate with the ICC. This is good for various reasons:
First, the ICC has the resources to conduct an extensive and comprehensive investigation on the drug war which our local agencies might not be capable of.
Second, the ICC is more immune to political pressure and security concerns unlike, again, the local agencies and even the local judicial system.
Third, the ICC’s involvement can harness international support to bring pressure on the government to cooperate more proactively in the investigation.
Then again, the principle of complementarity remains a precondition for intervention by the ICC. This principle means that the ICC can only intervene if national courts are unwilling or unable to genuinely prosecute the crimes. In short, the ICC must first determine that the Philippines’ judicial system is not adequately addressing the alleged crimes.
We have to begin considering what legal proceedings in the Philippines might look like. How will the Department of Justice conduct a preliminary investigation? What charges will be filed against Duterte and others? Will he be granted bail? How long will the trial be? How long will the appeals process be?
The Quad Committee is so far doing a good job, getting to the bottom of the illegal war against drugs of Duterte. They should keep on doing this until everything is known. Please gather the documentary evidence and all the testimonies. There are many whistleblowers out there.
The Senate proceedings is more tricky, in that Duterte has allies there (Senators Robin Padilla, Bong Go, and Bato del Rosario for example), some of whom are implicated in the killings and should be inhibiting themselves. Moving forward, that has to be corrected. On the other hand, the value of having his allies there made Duterte more confident, arrogant in fact, and talked more than necessary.
From the very onset, Duterte was allowed to speak and set the tone for the investigation. And it was downhill from there. He offered no apologies or excuses for his actions. “Don’t question my policies because I offer no apologies, no excuses. I did what I had to do, and whether you believe it or not, I did it for my country,” he stressed. “I have always viewed people addicted to illegal drugs as victims and patients requiring medical help and not as criminals,” he also said.
Many people did not like the chairing of Senator Koko Pimentel, finding him to be too deferential to Duterte. I disagree. Senator Koko, whether intentional or not, actually entrapped Duterte which made what Senator Risa called “bombshell admissions”. By being nice to him, Pimentel got Duterte in a place difficult for him to extricate himself from.
Duterte might have gain political points and cheers from his trolls, but make no mistake about it – that hearing was a legal disaster for him. For the first time, he made statements under oath about his orders to the police, about his Davao death squad, and his hatred of drug addicts. He has said these things before in speeches but for the first time under oath.
Duterte admitted that he maintained a group of assassins during his term as mayor of Davao; that this group of assassins was tasked to kill criminals; that he encouraged the police to “find ways’ so that the suspect could be “neutralized and negated”. While the former president took every possible effort to distance himself from making any admission that he ordered his police to kill, we know that the police took this to mean as an authority to employ lethal force. This is the reason why there are thousands upon thousands of “nanlaban” incidents which are so conveniently reflected in police reports every time there was a killing of drug suspects.
Senator Risa Hontiveros did very well in standing up to Duterte. She was both brilliant and courageous. But it is good that she was not chairing the hearing because then Duterte would not cooperate. He would behave like Alice Guo and getting him to tell the truth would like be pulling teeth without anesthesia and tools.
These proceedings will go on for a while. That is good. Indeed, as Martin Luther King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this particular context, it’s not going to take as long as we thought it would be. Justice is coming for Duterte and those who massacred the poor.
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