After his arrest on an international criminal court (ICC) warrant on Tuesday, the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, demonstrated an uncharacteristic concern for due legal process. A petition was unsuccessfully filed to his country’s supreme court to stay his extradition, as lawyers challenged the ICC’s jurisdiction, and pleas were made for any trial to take place in a Philippine court.
The relatives of those butchered during Mr Duterte’s brutal and lawless “war on drugs” will struggle to sympathise. Notoriously, many of its victims never got near a courtroom of any description. In 2016, months into a presidency in which thousands of Filipinos suffered summary executions, Mr Duterte readily acknowledged an indiscriminate dimension to the lawless carnage he had unleashed. The deaths of innocents and children, he told reporters, amounted to inevitable “collateral damage” in his mission to clean up the streets.
Given a green light from the top, vigilante gangs and hired hitmen turned the poorer parts of Manila and his home city of Davao into killing zones. Corrupt police were allegedly financially incentivised to shoot suspects rather than arrest them. Only a handful of officers were ever convicted of a crime. Testifying to the Philippine senate last October, the former president offered “no apologies, no excuses” for this reign of terror, during which foreign criticism was dismissed with swaggering contempt and internal opponents threatened and imprisoned.
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