Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla defended on Thursday the government’s action to surrender former president Rodrigo Duterte to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and acknowledged that it was the first such incident in the country’s history.

“It’s a case of first impression. This has never happened in our history,” Remulla said of the decision of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration to surrender Duterte to the ICC after his arrest on March 11.

The justice secretary was addressing Sen. Imee Marcos who, as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, is leading an inquiry into Duterte’s arrest and transfer to The Hague in the Netherlands, where he now awaits trial on charges of crimes against humanity stemming from his “war on drugs” that killed thousands.

Remulla made the statement when Marcos, the President’s elder sister and a known ally of the Dutertes, asked him to cite similar cases involving other Filipinos. He said the government in the past had arrested foreigners without a local court order.

At the hearing that took over five hours, Remulla and other officials maintained anew that the government did not cooperate with the ICC in allowing the ex-president’s arrest but with the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), which was implementing the warrant issued by the international tribunal.

‘Province of The Hague?’

In her opening statement, Marcos lamented that Duterte was surrendered to foreigners “as if he has no country, as if we cannot judge for ourselves in our own house.”

“They said the law should prevail. That’s correct. But whose law? Ours or theirs? Since when did the Philippines become a province of The Hague?” she said.

Duterte’s daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, who is in The Hague to organize his defense team, spoke at the hearing via Zoom to assert his alleged “illegal arrest.”

“This constitutes extraordinary rendition,” she said. “A Filipino citizen, a former president, was taken into custody without a valid warrant issued by a Philippine court, without due process, and without any legal basis under our laws.”

According to the Vice President, the government made a “warrantless arrest” which, she said, can only be done in cases of hot pursuit, of someone caught “in flagrante delicto,” or of an escaped prisoner.

She added: “Under whose authority did the Philippine National Police (PNP) act? Why did it enforce a foreign warrant without the Philippine court order? Why didn’t they at least bring [the ex-president] before a judge, as required by the Rome Statute?”

When the ICC began to investigate the extrajudicial killings that allegedly occurred as early as when he was mayor of Davao City, then-President Duterte withdrew the Philippines in 2018 as a state party to the Rome Statute that established the court. The withdrawal took effect a year later.

Noncooperation

President Marcos Jr. eventually took the position of noncooperation with the ICC in its investigation.

At the hearing, Senator Marcos asked the Cabinet officials why it seemed that the President had changed his stance. She cited his past statements on noncooperation with the international tribunal, and then pointed out “a slight, yet significant tone of the President’s rhetoric” on Feb. 20, 2024. “I don’t approve or deny it but you know, they (the ICC) haven’t done anything illegal,” he said then. “If they do, of course, we will do something about it. But we are an open country, we are not a closed country.”

But Remulla as well as Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro, Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla, National Security Adviser Eduardo Año, and PNP Director General Rommel Francisco Marbil all denied having communicated with or aided the ICC in its inquiry into the Duterte administration’s antidrug campaign.

Año denied reports that he was part of a “grand conspiracy” in the government that led to Duterte’s arrest, saying that his role was “limited to the mandate of [his] office—ensure that the situation does not escalate into a national security concern.” He served in Duterte’s administration as Armed Forces chief of staff and, later, as interior secretary.

The officials said they learned about Duterte’s arrest warrant when it was sent by Interpol to the Philippine Center on Transnational Crime (PCTC) in the early morning of March 11.

Interior Secretary Remulla said they learned about the ICC’s unsealing of the arrest warrant on March 7 only during the arrest of Duterte on March 11. He said that when he was informed by PCTC Executive Director Anthony Alcantara of the Interpol notice, he conferred with his brother, the justice secretary, who at that time was attending a conference in Vienna, and told President Marcos Jr. about it.

‘Diffusion’

Senator Marcos inquired why the government immediately acted to serve the arrest warrant on Duterte when Interpol had issued a “diffusion notice” and not a red notice. She said a diffused notice did not get the approval of the Interpol secretariat and was not reviewed by its commissioner.

“This is the first time that a warrant of arrest was honored by a member-state when this is just a diffusion,” she also said. “Interpol said President Duterte is not wanted [by them]. He is wanted by the ICC.”

The Vice President agreed that no red notice was issued by Interpol, and said this was why other countries were unaware of it. “What happened is that Interpol gave this to Philippine authorities and they, through the PNP, implemented the warrant directly to the accused. They did not bring him to our courts,” she said.

Alcantara, for his part, confirmed that Interpol sent a “wanted person diffused notice” and said it was equivalent to a red notice that necessitated them to act on it—an issue that the senator disagreed with.

Justice Secretary Remulla, meanwhile, argued that the Interpol diffusion notice was just a “form letter.” He explained several times during the hearing that the government banked on Section 17 of Republic Act No. 9851 (or the Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide, and Other Crimes Against Humanity, in implementing Duterte’s arrest.

The provision states that “authorities may surrender or extradite suspected or accused persons in the Philippines to the appropriate international court, if any, or to another State pursuant to the applicable extradition laws and treaties.”

Right to liberty of abode

But Marcos presented law professor Alex Medina, who said that the 1987 Constitution has supremacy over other statutes and that “whatever rights in the Constitution cannot be lessened or stripped away by any statute.”

Medina said the ex-president’s “right to liberty of abode” as provided in Section 6 of the Bill of Rights was violated when authorities served him the warrant. ”The right to liberty can be adjudged by a court of law,” he said. “Even assuming executive officials have the power of final adjudication, that person should be accorded administrative due process.”

Later, Remulla said Medina’s opinion on liberty of abode was more in the context of “the rule of search warrants.”

Before then, Remulla and Marcos had a heated exchange on why the government cooperated with the ICC in Duterte’s arrest, with the justice secretary saying that the international tribunal has no jurisdiction over states like the Philippines that have withdrawn from the Rome Statute, but it has jurisdiction over individuals accused of crimes violating the international humanitarian law.

Police Maj. Gen. Nicolas Torre III, chief of the PNP’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, was also questioned over the way Duterte was put on the plane that would take him to The Hague.

Torre said that at one point he had to handcuff Salvador Medialdea, Duterte’s former executive secretary, for obstruction of justice. He said Medialdea was preventing the police from taking the ex-president to the plane.

According to Torre, Duterte was initially served an electronic copy of the ICC warrant on the plane from Hong Kong, and at his request, was given a printed copy at Villamor Air Base where he was taken after his arrest.

There were instances during the hearing when Justice Secretary Remulla told Marcos that they could not divulge operational details of the arrest due to “executive privilege.”

Bullet holes in the head

Marcos also asked why, if the Philippine justice system is working, cases against the ex-president were not filed here.

Remulla reminded Marcos that the case against Duterte at the ICC was filed eight to nine years ago during his administration by the families of those killed during the antidrug campaign.

“There was a time when nothing happened in the investigation of extrajudicial killings,” he said.

Remulla said they looked into that time and found that there were no police reports or ballistic reports on the killings. “If there is no police report, where will you go? The police involved in the case have since been assigned to other places and there was no one to talk to,” he said, adding:

“In the drug war, the police had no blotter. Many died with death certificates stating these were due to cardiac arrest, but they had bullet holes in their head.”

Interior Secretary Remulla asked Marcos if the Senate could investigate those killed under such circumstances.

Marcos cited the conviction of the Caloocan policemen who killed 17-year-old student Kian de los Santos, in an apparent effort to show that there was “no zero” response to the killings in the antidrug campaign.

But the justice secretary told Marcos that those cops were convicted of homicide, and not murder. He also said forensic expert Dr. Raquel Fortun had documented 16 cases of victims with cardiac arrest as the official cause of death but with bullet holes in their head.

Remulla said those who went to the ICC did so because “for the longest time, the families had nowhere to go” but to the international tribunal.

On Duterte’s arrest, he said no one among them was happy about it but that they had to do their job.

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