Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. A self-proclaimed tough guy, he encouraged the extra-judicial killings (i.e., murder without trial by government forces) of supposed drug dealers and criminals, claiming that he himself had carried out such killings when he had been mayor of the town of Davao. The victims were alleged drug users, alleged petty criminals, and street children. After leaving the office of the presidency, he was re-elected as mayor of Davao in 2025.

But he may not be able to serve out his term as mayor because a little over a year ago, he was arrested and taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to stand trial and is now the first former Asian head of state to stand trial in the ICC.

On March 11, 2025, Duterte touched down at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport after a flight from Hong Kong to find more than three hundred officers waiting for him. Under “Operation Pursuit,” Filipino police and Interpol executed an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant tying him to crimes against humanity committed during his self-proclaimed “war on drugs” and quickly put him on a plane to the Netherlands.

The ICC judges have now confirmed that Duterte will stand trial in November 2026. We should be happy that the once untouchable strongman has been in jail for over a year and will soon be held to account for his record in power.

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Duterte’s arrest and transfer to international custody is more than a procedural novelty — it signals a potential sea change in human rights justice. As president from 2016 to 2022, he declared a war on drugs based on the premise that the apparatus of the state could act with impunity so long as propaganda framed its actions as upholding “order.”

Some six thousand extrajudicial killings of alleged drug users and petty criminals as well as poor and dispossessed people in general were not anomalies but systematic. Now the machinery of transnational justice is forcing the regime of terror to stop and face a judicial process.
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For the victims and their families, this is recognition not just of their suffering but of their claim that those who unleashed the violence can be held to account. When the children of the urban poor, shot in alleyways under the guise of “anti-drug operations,” see the operator at the top hauled before a tribunal, it conveys a message that their lives and their grief are not invisible.

Moreover, when a former president cannot rely on the protection of office or networks of power to keep him above the law, it indicates that the game has changed. While authoritarianism will adapt and try to claw back its impunity, this precedent matters.

Both domestically and internationally, the arrest also reinforces the idea that legal norms have some bite. The ICC is imperfect (painfully slow, arguably politicized, and seemingly selective), but it stands as one of the few remaining institutions that insists even heads of state must answer for their crimes — an important line to be drawn in an age when the influence of international law is declining.

The idea that government forces can act with impunity as long as they can claim some vague justification for their actions is something we are sadly familiar with in the US, especially with the Trump regime and its use of ICE and CBP thugs to terrorize and even kill people. But the US is a lawless nation that is not a signatory to the ICC and so can avoid its jurisdiction. However, even if it were a member of the ICC, the US justice system is far too protective of its politicians to imagine that any former president will be extradited to the Hague and tried, even when they have committed international war crimes, so there can be no expectation of them being tried for domestic abuses.

The same is true for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister Yoav Gallant. At least in their cases, the ICC has issued arrest warrants but since Israel is also a lawless nation and not a signatory to the ICC, they will not be turned over by their own countries. However, “all 125 ICC member states, including France and the United Kingdom, are required to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter the state’s territory.” It is clear that the two of them will not go to any of those countries unless they are assured by those governments that they will not be arrested, and even then they may be hesitant.

The Philippines has to be commended for arresting and handing over their former president, even though he still had considerable support in the country from people who are enamored of tough-guy politicians even if they act criminally.