The Road to the ICC Prosecution of Philippine Warlord Rodrigo Duterte

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is the first former leader of an Asian country to face trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC).¹⁾ In 2025, Duterte was arrested and brought to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity.²⁾ The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber confirmed the charges in April 2026, and the trial will start in November 2026.³⁾

In this blog post, I will share my experiences as chairperson of the Philippine human rights organisation Center for International Law (CenterLaw) of using law as a form of resistance in the context of ongoing, relentless mass violence perpetrated by the state. CenterLaw’s decade-long involvement in assisting victims of Duterte’s drug war campaign, which resulted in more than 30,000 extrajudicial killings,⁴⁾ culminated in the appointment of two CenterLaw lawyers (myself and Gilbert Andres) as Common Legal Representatives of Victims (CLRV) in the ICC case Prosecutor v. Rodrigo Duterte. A former CenterLaw legal fellow (Nicolene Arcaina) was also appointed as case manager for the CLRV team. While we are still waiting for the trial to start, I will focus here on the various strategies that CenterLaw employed on the domestic level. Because it explores law’s capacity to resist, this post can also be read as a report from the engine room of appliedreflexive globalisation, an idea recently presented by Philipp Dann and Florian Jeßberger.⁵⁾ Elements of an arguably Northern concept and institution (such as criminal responsibility before the ICC) are applied to struggles in the South for the very reason of liberation, peace, and emancipation from the most powerful.

Duterte’s War on Drugs

Even as mayor of Davao City (1988-1998; 2001-2010; 2013-2016), Duterte’s rule was linked to extrajudicial killings orchestrated through the so-called Davao Death Squad, which gave monetary rewards per kill to police and their civilian assets.⁶⁾ This reward system was expanded nationwide during Duterte’s six years as president (2016-2022). During this period, Duterte operationalised his drug war campaign primarily through “Oplan Tokhang”, a police initiative involving house-to-house visits to suspected drug personalities, which often led to lethal encounters. Police reports justified the resulting killings by claiming “nanlaban” (the suspect fought back), a claim widely contested by civil society.

The First Legal Cases

CenterLaw filed the first legal challenge against Duterte’s drug war campaign in January 2017. Two groups of cases were initiated. In the first case,⁷⁾ Efren Morillo and four of his friends were playing pool outside a shanty house when policemen came, restrained them, and shot them execution-style. Efren’s four friends died instantly. Efren was shot in the chest, but he survived by playing dead. When the police were not looking, Efren jumped into a ravine, escaped, and lived to identify the police officers who had attacked them. The police twisted the story by claiming that it was Efren and his friends who had fired first, prompting the police to fight back. They charged Efren with direct assault. After seven years of trial, CenterLaw secured Efren’s acquittal.

On behalf of Efren and the families of the four men killed, CenterLaw filed a petition for a writ of amparo before the Philippine Supreme Court against top police officials.⁸⁾ A writ of amparo is an extraordinary protective remedy designed to safeguard and enforce the constitutional rights to life, liberty, and security, particularly applicable in cases of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. The concept of “amparo”, which means refuge or protection, originates from Latin American jurisdictions and was adopted by the Philippine Supreme Court in 2007. In the amparo petition filed by CenterLaw, the court issued the writ by permanently prohibiting the police from entering within a one-kilometre radius from the homes and workplaces of the petitioners and ordering the officers’ reassignment elsewhere. Efren also filed criminal charges of murder, frustrated murder, robbery, planting of evidence, and administrative complaints for grave misconduct against the policemen. After nearly seven years, the cases against the policemen were dismissed on dubious grounds. The dismissal has been appealed to higher courts.

In 2017, CenterLaw filed a second writ of amparo case in the Supreme Court for the protection of a cluster of 26 villages.⁹⁾ The case was a class suit filed by 39 residents on behalf of the area’s more than 200,000 residents where 35 killings had taken place in the context of the drug war campaign. While no protection order was granted, the petitioners reported that both police and vigilante killings totally stopped the day after the case was filed and became front-page news. After almost ten years, the case remains pending in the Supreme Court.

CenterLaw viewed its legal representation of victims’ families not only in terms of bringing individual perpetrators to justice but also as part of a collective effort to stem the tide of extrajudicial killings and human rights violations. The cases filed by CenterLaw not only sought relief for its clients but they were also test cases to gauge the response of state actors to pushback by civil society and to determine how Duterte’s drug war could be challenged and ultimately brought to an end. The urgent objective was to stop the killings, and CenterLaw’s strategies expanded to other remedies as Duterte’s drug war campaign continued and exposed clients to further danger.

Writ of Amparo

The first additional strategy was a petition for a writ of amparo. CenterLaw’s clients in the above-mentioned domestic cases initially refused to file any legal case because of fear. CenterLaw therefore presented the option of a petition for a writ of amparo, which merely aims to obtain protection from police abuses and does not ascribe criminal liability to the perpetrators. The clients agreed.

The writ of amparo issued for Morillo et al. became an effective protection against police harassment. When breaches of the writ were reported, CenterLaw went to court to cite the police in contempt, and the mere filing of court motions stopped the harassment. On the other hand, while no writ of protection was issued in the second case, the mere filing of the amparo petition yielded two positive results: the police and their agents immediately stopped the killings, and the Supreme Court ordered the Philippine National Police to provide CenterLaw with copies of all records of drug-war-related deaths nationwide.¹⁰⁾ The records are crucial evidence in the domestic and international prosecution for crimes against humanity.

CenterLaw enlisted the media in publicising the petitions and complaint statements of the victims’ families, exposing violations by the police. Media coverage translated into a level of protection for both CenterLaw’s lawyers and its clients.

Community Paralegal Training and Rapid Legal Response

To equip the petitioners with legal knowledge and increase the number of legal first responders to violations, CenterLaw provided paralegal training and held workshops for its clients and their community members. Training emphasised practical knowledge of what victims and witnesses can do in cases of actual violations: the legal requirements before police can conduct drug buy-bust operations; the limited instances in which a warrantless arrest is lawful; the instances and requirements of a valid search of a person or dwelling without a warrant; training on documentation of eyewitness testimonies and writing of sworn statements; and gathering and preservation of evidence on a killing or human rights violation incident. The democratisation of legal knowledge proved to thwart further violations. CenterLaw clients reported banding together to confront officers attempting illegal arrests, which resulted in the police retreating without taking the person into custody.

Posting of Legal Rights Advisories

A third additional remedy consisted in the posting of legal rights advisories. CenterLaw developed a community-based intervention by releasing legal rights advisories in affected neighbourhoods. These materials outlined legal limits on police conduct and served both as a deterrent and as an educational tool. The campaign involved posting signs of “Sampung Babala” (“Ten Warnings”). Echoing the Passover story, residents posted the signs on their doors to ward off police from entering the dwelling and violating residents’ rights. The signs contained an enumeration of constitutional rights, prohibitions, and legal requirements of presenting arrest warrants and search warrants. The warnings included, for example: “Violations of human rights are punishable by imprisonment and removal from position. 1. Killing and arresting without due process of law is prohibited. 2. Arrest without a warrant of arrest is prohibited, except when a crime is openly committed in front of the arresting officer. 3. Searching a house without a search warrant is prohibited.”

This novel approach was effective, as residents who posted the signs on their doors did not experience any police intrusions into their homes. It created safe zones in the community which police avoided.

The Role of Law in the Escalation and Resistance

CenterLaw began by acting as legal counsel in discrete cases in 2016 and 2017. As the mass killings continued and clients were exposed to danger, its intervention evolved into a combination of strategies employed to counter threats of bodily harm, arrest, and harassment by police forces, local assets, and village officials that formed part of the “war on drugs” apparatus.¹¹⁾ The efficacy of the combined strategies is a starting point for understanding how the invocation of law can thwart police and other state actors in committing state crimes.

CenterLaw’s engagement in the courtroom and on the ground called out state conduct and sought to label it illegitimate. It drew the state into public debate and ascribed to it atrocities of the most serious kind in violation of international criminal law. Aside from the expressive and expansive use of law as resistance, the combined use of different strategies led to instances in which state actors scaled back, stopped, or even retreated. In this sense, CenterLaw’s engagement in Duterte’s drug war illustrates the power of law, including international criminal law, as a form of resistance in the context of ongoing, relentless mass violence perpetrated by the state.