None of this means justice is inevitable, or that Dela Rosa will board a plane to The Hague tomorrow. Impunity fights hard on its way out.
THERE is a quote, worn smooth from overuse but no less true for it, that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed it from a 19th-century abolitionist preacher. He believed it. He died before he could see it proven right.
The Philippines is living that arc right now — and the bending, when it comes, is rarely graceful.
Rodrigo Duterte stood before crowds and told them killing was the answer. He called it governance. Love of country, he said. For six years, the bodies piled up in the streets, and the men who gave the orders walked free, ran for office, and won. Ronald dela Rosa became a senator. Bong Go became a senator. The machinery of impunity dressed itself in democratic clothing and kept running.
Then the arc bent.
Duterte is in The Hague. Dela Rosa is cornered inside a Senate building, broadcasting on Facebook and asking strangers for help. The same men who once commanded the most powerful police force in the country are now filing emergency petitions and hiding behind colleagues. This is what the end of impunity looks like — nothing like the movies, but real.
It did not happen fast. It never does. A complaint was filed with the ICC in 2017. Nearly a decade passed. Witnesses were intimidated. The Philippines withdrew from the court. Critics were jailed, including Leila de Lima, who spent nearly seven years in detention over trumped-up drug charges. The architects of the drug war congratulated themselves on surviving.
But the arc kept bending.
The families of the dead kept showing up — to vigils nobody covered, to hearings where they sat in back rows and waited. They had no senators, no task forces. Just the stubborn, irrational insistence that what happened to their children and neighbors was wrong, and that wrong things should eventually be accounted for.
History, it turns out, agreed with them.
None of this means justice is inevitable, or that Dela Rosa will board a plane to The Hague tomorrow. Impunity fights hard on its way out. It files motions, reorganizes leadership, does whatever it takes to buy another day. But the arc does not care about delay. It only cares about direction — and the direction, however slow and unworthy of the suffering that preceded it, is clear.
The rock cannot hide forever. The universe is not finished bending. (Rights Report Philippines)
