Nicholas Kaufman’s contract expired and his conduct drew official rebukes — but the real story is that he ran out of legal road.
FOR more than a year, Nicholas Kaufman fought to make sure Rodrigo Duterte would never face a criminal trial. He failed on every front and now he’s gone.
The British-Israeli barrister filed a withdrawal request on May 8 with the International Criminal Court, citing the expiration of his one-year engagement as lead counsel for the former Philippine president. His associate, French international criminal lawyer and Leiden University professor Dov Jacobs, left the same day. ICC Trial Chamber III granted Jacobs’ request immediately.
Kaufman’s replacement counsel was not identified in the ICC’s grant of his request. Kaufman referred to him as having a “wealth of experience at the ICC.”
On paper, it was a routine end to a contract. In practice, it was the closing of a chapter that saw Kaufman attempt and lose nearly every pre-trial legal maneuver available to him — and, in the end, become a liability for the very client he was hired to defend.
Kaufman built his reputation in The Hague by stopping cases before they start. His clearest win came in 2011, when he secured the dismissal of charges against Rwandan rebel leader Callixte Mbarushimana for insufficient evidence. It’s the kind of pre-trial kill shot he was clearly aiming for again in Manila.
Against Duterte, he took aim at every pillar of the prosecution’s case in the pre-trial phase. He challenged the court’s jurisdiction, arguing that the Philippines’ 2019 withdrawal from the Rome Statute stripped the ICC of authority over the case. He tried to win his client’s release from Scheveningen Prison by arguing Duterte’s health and alleged cognitive decline created an unfair proceeding. He sought to disqualify the Filipino lawyers representing the drug war’s victims from the case entirely.
He lost all of it.
On April 22, the ICC Appeals Chamber rejected all four grounds of Duterte’s jurisdictional challenge. The following day, Pre-Trial Chamber I confirmed all three counts of crimes against humanity against the former president, finding substantial grounds to believe he is responsible for the deaths of 78 victims across 49 incidents — 76 people killed and two who survived attempted murder — crimes carried out, prosecutors say, as part of a systematic plan that stretched from his years as Davao City mayor through his presidency.
Kaufman’s exit was not simply a matter of a contract running out. In the weeks before he filed his withdrawal, his own conduct — a pattern of public attacks on the court he returned to repeatedly throughout the Duterte proceedings, and that drew two formal warnings from the chamber — had been weaponized against his client by the prosecution itself.
After the back-to-back losses on April 22 and 23, Kaufman went to the media waiting outside the ICC building with a sustained attack on the institution judging his client. He declared the court was “in a state of crisis,” said its judges “have nothing to do,” and suggested they confirmed the charges against Duterte merely to “justify their workload.”
In another interview, he said he sometimes felt like he was “banging his head against the wall” and that the proceedings were driven by “political dimensions which are beyond your control.”
ICC Deputy Prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang did not let it pass. In a formal filing, she noted that Kaufman had been warned twice by the chamber about his obligations under the ICC Code of Professional Conduct. His remarks, she wrote, were “offensive and categorically false” and reflected “a pattern of deplorable conduct.”
She then turned those remarks against the defense: Kaufman’s public campaign calling the court corrupt, she argued, directly contradicted Duterte’s own pending request for the court to grant another appeal — a request that asked the very judges Kaufman had spent weeks publicly denigrating to exercise their discretion in Duterte’s favor.
In other words, Kaufman’s strategy had become an argument for denying his client the relief he sought.
The departure, at least on the surface, was orderly. In his May 8 filing, Kaufman told the court that his defense team had visited Duterte the previous day, and that the former president had formally released him from his representation and expressed a desire to appoint new counsel. A replacement lawyer — whose identity was redacted in the public filing — had already agreed to step in and appear at a status conference set for May 27.
“I am convinced that the continuity and efficacy of Mr. Duterte’s representation will remain assured,” Kaufman wrote, through the unnamed successor who, he noted, has “a wealth of experience at the International Criminal Court.”
The official framing from the defense was a “reorganization,” a deliberate retooling ahead of the trial phase, which requires a different kind of legal expertise than the procedural and jurisdictional combat Kaufman specializes in. That much is true. Trial proceedings at the ICC can last years and demand deep experience in evidence management, witness examination, and the sustained rhythm of the courtroom. Kaufman’s record belongs largely to a different arena.
The case against Duterte now sits with Trial Chamber III, a new panel of three judges constituted specifically for the trial phase — Presiding Judge Joanna Korner, and Judges Keebong Paek and Nicolas Guillou. A status conference is set for May 27. ICC-accredited lawyer Kristina Conti has estimated the trial could begin as early as October 2026, or run into the first months of 2027.
Duterte, 81, has been held at the ICC’s detention facility in Scheveningen since March 2025. He faces three counts of crimes against humanity for the killings carried out under his anti-drug campaign — a campaign that the Philippine government has reported killed more than 6,000 people, while human rights groups put the toll as high as 30,000. (Rights Report Philippines)
