A ruling against the ICC’s jurisdiction on the Duterte case would leave thousands of Filipino families with few good options — and a government that has shown little appetite to be the answer.
THE most unsettling thing about the ICC jurisdiction ruling scheduled tomorrow (April 22 in Manila) is not what happens if the court confirms it has the right to try Rodrigo Duterte. That path, however long and fraught, is at least a path.
The harder question is what comes next if the appeals chamber decides The Hague never had jurisdiction in the first place — and sends everyone home.
For the families of people killed during the drug war, a ruling in Duterte’s favor would not just end a court case. It would close what is, for most of them, the only door that has ever been open.
Before considering what might be done, it’s worth being honest about what has been done.
Domestic accountability for the drug war killings – with as many as 30,000 dead – remains woefully inadequate. The failure is not entirely a matter of political will, though that is certainly part of it. It is also structural. The Philippines’ own justice secretary, Jesus Crispin Remulla, told a Senate committee in March 2025 that investigating drug war killings had been extremely difficult due to a lack of police records and necessary evidence — and that victims were compelled to file cases before the ICC precisely because they had failed to get justice in Philippine courts.
In June 2025, the same Department of Justice under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. admitted that the Philippine justice system was unable to secure accountability for the drug war due to destroyed or absent evidence, effectively ceding prosecution of the crimes to the ICC.
That is a remarkable admission. The government handed the case to the ICC — and then the question of whether the ICC could actually take it became a years-long legal fight.
READ: Why Duterte Will Be Tried at the ICC. And Why That’s Still Not Enough.
What’s Left on the Table
If the ICC exits the picture, victims and their advocates are not entirely without recourse. But none of the remaining options are quick, clean, let alone guaranteed.
The most obvious alternative – domestic criminal prosecution – is also the most fraught. The Department of Justice created a task force in November 2024 to investigate drug war killings, but its track record offers little cause for optimism. Amnesty International has documented that the current administration has failed to credibly investigate, let alone prosecute, those suspected of committing and ordering extrajudicial killings. The evidence destruction problem, which the DOJ itself has acknowledged, makes building cases against senior officials — let alone Duterte himself — enormously difficult.
And the political incentives point in the wrong direction: Marcos has no obvious interest in pursuing a prosecution that could destabilize domestic politics or alienate Duterte’s still-substantial base ahead of the 2028 elections.
Human Rights Watch, where I used to work, and other rights groups have repeatedly urged the Philippine government to establish a formal truth commission — a body empowered to take testimony from survivors and witnesses, document what happened, and make binding recommendations on justice and reparations. Such a commission would not be a criminal mechanism; in itself, it could not put anyone behind bars.
But in the absence of prosecution, the commission could at least create an official record — one that names names, establishes facts, and gives victims something closer to recognition. Several countries emerging from periods of mass state violence have used similar bodies to lay the groundwork for later legal action. The Philippines has not moved toward one.
The UN Human Rights Council has engaged with the Philippines’ drug war situation before, though with limited results. The broader UN system — through special rapporteurs, treaty body reviews, and the Universal Periodic Review process — continues to provide forums where the Philippine government faces scrutiny (and defend its dismal rights record) and where civil society can submit evidence and testimony.
In theory, victims’ families could pursue civil cases in Philippine courts against individual officers or the state, seeking damages rather than criminal punishment. In practice, this path has been rarely traveled and rarely successful. The same evidentiary gaps that cripple criminal prosecution would hamper civil suits. Witnesses in cases involving state violence face well-documented intimidation risks. And the Philippine court system, while independent in principle, has historically been slow to move against the security apparatus.
Rejoin the ICC?
There is one move the Marcos administration could make that would change the calculus more than any of the above: rejoin the International Criminal Court.
Re-accession to the Rome Statute would not automatically revive a dismissed Duterte case — the jurisdictional clock would restart from the date of rejoining, not from 2011. But it would signal a genuine break with the Duterte-era logic that international accountability is something to be escaped rather than embraced. It would restore an external check on future state violence. And it would put the Philippines back in good standing with the international legal community at a moment when that standing matters. Analysts have argued that rejoining the ICC could restore the Philippines’ standing abroad and reaffirm its commitment to the rule of law — and that doing so could define the legacy of President Marcos.
The Marcos administration has repeatedly said it would not rejoin the ICC, maintaining that Philippine institutions are capable of addressing legal matters within the country’s jurisdiction. That position is hard to square with the justice secretary’s own testimony that those institutions already failed.
The Witnesses Who Keep Showing Up
There is one more force worth naming in this accountability landscape, one that has been doing the work long before Duterte was arrested, and that would need to keep doing it long after any court ruling, favorable or not.
Philippine civil society organizations and human rights journalists have spent nearly a decade building the evidentiary record that formal institutions either couldn’t or wouldn’t build themselves. In a cramped room beneath UP Diliman’s Palma Hall, a small team of researchers and student assistants from the Third World Studies Center parse through hundreds of news reports and police Facebook pages each week to count the dead for the Dahas Project, the university monitoring initiative that has become the most reliable independent tally of drug war killings in the country..
That counter-archive mattered. Groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism drew from it. So, ultimately, did the ICC. Journalists from Rappler and other media, as well as researchers and advocates from many of these groups have authored and contributed to multiple reports documenting human rights violations linked to Duterte’s anti-drug campaign. They provided detailed accounts of killings, police operations, and patterns of impunity that shaped the public record of what happened.
If the ICC closes, that work doesn’t become less important. It becomes the only game in town.
But doing this work in the Philippines carries real risk — the killings and attacks against journalists and advocates – and that risk has not gone away under the Marcos administration. The CIVICUS Monitor currently rates the state of civic space in the Philippines as repressed. The connection between that repression and the accountability gap is not incidental.
This is why the international community’s attention to civil society in the Philippines matters as much as its attention to the court case. Without sustained support — and without meaningful protection for journalists and researchers operating under threat — the documentation that any future accountability effort would depend on gets harder and harder to produce.
The Deeper Problem
All of these options share a common vulnerability: they depend, to varying degrees, on a government that has not demonstrated it wants to do this work.
My former colleague at Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson, has argued that Marcos now faces a defining choice: he can continue outsourcing justice to the ICC while tolerating a culture of impunity at home, or he can demonstrate genuine commitment to accountability and the rule of law — which would require a clear public repudiation of the anti-drug campaign’s methods and an explicit assurance that they are no longer acceptable state policy.
That choice was already difficult before tomorrow’s ruling. If the appeals chamber strips the ICC of jurisdiction, the external pressure that has helped push Manila toward even modest accountability steps disappears along with it.
Courts need evidence, evidence requires witnesses, and witnesses need protection. That chain is only as strong as its most vulnerable link. And in the Philippines right now, the most vulnerable links are the people still showing up every week to count the dead.
In February, I was in The Hague to cover the confirmation of charges proceedings. In the public gallery with me and many journalists and advocates were the families of victims, the ones who wept at the first real legal steps they had ever seen taken toward justice. They understood something that can get lost in the procedural language of jurisdictional appeals. The ICC was never the ideal venue for this reckoning. It was the venue of last resort, the court families turned to after their own country’s courts had already failed them.
READ: The Weight of the Room
If that last resort closes, the burden falls squarely on the Philippine government. The question is whether Malacanang is ready to carry that responsibility. (Rights Report Philippines)
Carlos Conde is the founding editor of Rights Report Philippines. He was the Philippines researcher for Human Rights Watch for nearly 14 years and documented the extrajudicial killings attributed to Duterte during the drug war and when he was mayor of Davao City.
Media outlets are welcome to republish this oped as long as Rights Report Philippines is credited.
