A written submission has reached the United Nations Human Rights Council, and it deserves more attention than it has received. It argues plainly that the continued detention of former President Rodrigo Duterte at the International Criminal Court is not justice but arbitrary detention, and that the process behind it should trouble every Filipino who believes in due process and national sovereignty.
The submission, filed before the Council's 62nd session by the International Career Support Association, makes three arguments worth taking seriously. First, that the ICC has been drawn into domestic political rivalry rather than acting as a neutral tribunal. Second, that Duterte's arrest and transfer violated the Rome Statute's own complementarity principle, which gives priority to a country's own functioning courts over an international tribunal. Third, that the Philippines, having formally withdrawn from the Rome Statute in 2019, years before Duterte's arrest in March 2025, had every right to expect that withdrawal to mean something.
That last point deserves emphasis, because it is not a matter of opinion. A state does not remain bound indefinitely to a treaty it has formally exited. The argument that the ICC retains authority over acts alleged during the years the Philippines was still a member is a legal theory, not a settled fact, and serious international lawyers continue to dispute it. Treating that theory as beyond question, simply because the court itself has ruled in its own favor, asks Filipinos to accept that the accused tribunal is also the final judge of its own jurisdiction.
There is also the matter of complementarity, the very principle the Rome Statute was built on. The ICC exists as a court of last resort, meant to act only when a nation's own justice system is unwilling or unable to prosecute. The Philippines has functioning courts, an active judiciary, and an ongoing Senate inquiry into the very abuses at issue. To bypass all of that machinery is to treat a sovereign nation's institutions as inadequate without ever letting them try.
The credibility of this entire process has been further clouded by allegations that deserve full public airing rather than quiet burial. Lawyer Levito Baligod, together with eighteen former Philippine Marines, has alleged in sworn affidavits that cash, reportedly totaling one to two million dollars, was delivered to ICC investigators during their visit to the Philippines in December 2023, funneled through the same flood-control corruption network already under Senate investigation. Baligod has alleged that senior figures at the highest levels of government orchestrated the broader disbursement scheme.
Malacañang, through spokesperson Claire Castro, has denied the allegations, and Senator Imee Marcos has filed Senate Resolution 317 seeking a formal inquiry. These remain allegations, unproven and contested, and the accused are entitled to the presumption of innocence. But allegations of this scale, involving cash payments to the very investigators building a case against a former president, are not something a nation confident in the fairness of that case should wish to see swept aside. If even a fraction of these claims withstands a Senate inquiry, the entire evidentiary foundation of the case against Duterte would deserve to be reopened and independently reviewed, not quietly upheld on the strength of an investigation whose own integrity is now in question.
There is a principle worth invoking here that Filipinos and Americans have long shared: that due process is not negotiable, and that no prosecution, however internationally sanctioned, is above scrutiny when serious questions about its integrity are raised. That principle should not be set aside simply because the person it protects is politically divisive to some.
None of this requires denying that real victims exist from the drug war years, or that their families deserve accountability. It requires only that accountability be pursued through processes whose legitimacy is not itself in doubt. An eighty-one-year-old former president, held for well over a year, has already had requests for interim release denied multiple times while these very questions remain unresolved. Humanitarian consideration for his age and health is not a favor. It is the ordinary standard the law affords any detainee whose guilt has not been finally established.
Filipinos who value sovereignty should ask why our own institutions have not pressed these questions as forcefully as a foreign submission has. The Department of Foreign Affairs has dismissed the UNHRC filing as baseless, but a dismissal is not a rebuttal, and procedural silence from Geneva is not the same as a finding on the merits. The bribery allegations alone warrant a domestic reckoning, independent of whatever Geneva ultimately decides.
It is worth asking, too, what precedent this sets. If a former head of state of a sovereign nation can be extradited to a tribunal that country had already left, on the strength of an investigation now shadowed by unresolved corruption allegations, no future Philippine leader is safe from the same treatment, regardless of party or record. That should alarm Filipinos across the political spectrum, not only Duterte's supporters. Sovereignty, once treated as negotiable in one case, becomes harder to defend in the next.
A nation that trusts its own institutions should not need a foreign NGO to ask the hardest questions about a former president's fate. It should be asking them itself, loudly, and demanding real answers before the world concludes, correctly or not, that the answers were never wanted in the first place.
•______________________× Political analyst Dr. Darwin T. Rasul III is a regular columnist of OpinYon. He has served as Expert-Consultant of European Union Germany, ARMM Cabinet Assistant Secretary (Asec.), Editor-in-Chief of ARMM Official Publication, and was a legislative researcher and then as consultant in the Senate of the Philippines. He is a book author and a feature writer.
#WeTakeAStand #OpinYon #OpinYonNews