“It appears the government decided to end the drama swiftly and no longer wait for FPRRD’s lawyers to exhaust all legal remedies due him”
We were all wondering why the Police took FPRRD to Villamor Airbase instead of Camp Crame.
Now we know that a chartered plane was in fact parked there waiting to fly him to The Hague where he is right now.
It appears the government decided to end the drama swiftly and no longer wait for FPRRD’s lawyers to exhaust all legal remedies due him.
Whether that was the right decision to make will depend on how FPRRD’s lawyers will exploit this seeming lapse on the part of the government.
PBBM in his short interview late Tuesday night said the government was obliged to help due to a request for assistance from the Interpol which as a member country in good standing cannot refuse.
And what exactly was this request for assistance the government cannot refuse?
As someone familiar with Transnational Crimes and Interpol, let me try as best as I could to explain.
If the public will recall, PBBM in the past has been saying the ICC has no jurisdiction here, hence, the government will not recognize the ICC’s authority in the country.
Later however, the government changed its tune and said that if the Interpol will request for assistance, the country is duty bound to cooperate.
But was the government bound to act so swiftly and how exactly was the request for assistance made?
The request must have been a Red Notice which was received by the Office of the SETC being the government office that coordinates and regularly communicates with the Interpol.
A Red Notice from the Interpol is a request for cooperation and assistance from Interpol member countries.
The assistance in this case is for the provisional arrest and detention of a wanted person who happens to be FPRRD for possible extradition for trial by the ICC.
Why was the ICC Arrest Warrant coursed thru the Interpol? Because the ICC requested for the help and assistance of the Interpol which it does regularly.
As we can see, the administration has decided to honor the request for assistance which it did very swiftly.
In addition to the Red Notice, there are in fact eight other color coded notices that the Interpol uses in order to facilitate international cooperation between law enforcement agencies of Interpol member countries.
The Red is used to seek the arrest of wanted persons for prosecution.
Yellow is used to locate missing persons,
Blue is to collect additional information about a person’s identity while Black seeks information on unidentified bodies.
A Green Notice on the other hand provides warning about a persons criminal activities if that person is a threat to public safety.
The last three which are Orange, Purple and Silver warns of an event that might impact public safety, modus operandi, object, and other methods used by certain criminals and providing identities and tracing criminal assets respectively.
The last one which is Silver is relatively new and is in its trial phase but should be a warning to those criminals who try to launder their stolen assets that there is now a sophisticated way of going after laundered money worldwide which has become very common among white collar criminals nowadays.
It is interesting to note that FPRRD’s lawyers when they went to the Supreme Court anchored their argument on jurisdiction because the country withdrew from the Rome statute in 2019.
But they seem to forget that the charges against FPRRD were crimes committed from 2011 to 2019 when the country was still a member which even our Supreme Court decided that the country is bound to recognize.
All these are now academic considering that FPRRD is already in The Hague.
The family should now recruit the best international lawyers in the business to afford him the best possible defense.
It is sad that FPRRD’s career should end this way.
Had he remained patient and controlled or kept his mouth shut, his daughter VP Sara Duterte would be on her way to the presidency come 2028 but that is not his nature.
Instead, he is in a faraway land awaiting trial.
Unfortunately, for as long as he is there, part of the nation’s attention will always be on him which can be distracting.