OPINION: The ICC came for Ronald dela Rosa. The Senate hid him. And in doing so, it may have sealed its own disgrace, Carlos Conde writes.
IT BEGAN with a man running down a government corridor. By nightfall, it had become something far more serious: a test of whether this country’s most powerful lawmakers answer to the law — or exist above it.
The answer the Senate gave on Monday was not reassuring.
On the evening of May 11, the International Criminal Court confirmed that it had unsealed an arrest warrant for Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief who ran Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. The warrant had been kept secret since November last year. Now it was public. The court found reasonable grounds to believe Dela Rosa had committed murder as a crime against humanity, tied to killings during the drug war.
He is the second Filipino official with a confirmed ICC warrant. The first was Duterte himself, who is now in custody in The Hague.
What followed Dela Rosa’s unmasking was not an arrest. It was a spectacle — and a damning one.
The Dash, the Scuffle, the Shelter
Dela Rosa had been hiding for months, skipping Senate sessions after word of the warrant first leaked. He chose Monday, of all days, to return — not to face his accusers, but to cast a vote that ousted Senate President Tito Sotto and handed the chamber’s leadership to Alan Peter Cayetano, a Duterte family loyalist.
His timing could not have been more deliberate. Or more telling.
After the vote, National Bureau of Investigation agents showed up, brought by former Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, who had a copy of the ICC warrant. Dela Rosa claimed agents physically stopped him from entering the building. He said he wrestled free. He arrived in the session hall with an injured finger. He dashed through Senate corridors.
And then, instead of being arrested, he was placed under Senate protective custody by the very colleagues he had just helped put in power.
The NBI agents trying to serve the warrant were cited in contempt. Dela Rosa was handed the chairmanship of the Senate committee on drugs and public order — the committee whose mandate covers precisely the kind of police conduct now being tried at The Hague.
The absurdity is not accidental. It is the point.
A Tidy Argument?
Dela Rosa’s lawyers ran to the Supreme Court arguing that only a Philippine judge can order his arrest, not an international court. It is a tidy argument. It also doesn’t hold up.
The Philippines may have withdrawn from the ICC in 2019, but that withdrawal does not erase what happened before it. The Rome Statute’s own rules say a country that leaves the court is still obligated to cooperate on crimes committed while it was a member — and the drug war killings happened squarely within that window.
The Philippine Supreme Court said as much in 2021. Leaving the ICC, the justices wrote, does not free a country from the obligations it took on as a member.
Beyond the treaty, there is also Republic Act 9851 — a Philippine law, not an international one — that requires the government to hand suspects over to international tribunals for crimes against humanity. The government cannot hide behind sovereignty here. The law it passed with its own Congress says otherwise.
There is also no Philippine law — none — that gives local courts the power to block or second-guess an ICC arrest warrant. Without that, any petition asking a Philippine court to override The Hague has no legal leg to stand on.
The law says arrest him and send him over. The Senate said no.
An Institution That Has Chosen Its Side
The Philippine Senate has made questionable calls before. But what happened Monday stands apart, not just because of what the senators did, but because of how openly and cheerfully they did it.
This was not a close call made in good faith. This was a coordinated performance: a leadership coup timed to the House impeachment vote next door, a fugitive senator welcomed back like a returning hero, law enforcement officers treated as criminals for doing their jobs, and a committee chairmanship handed to a man wanted by an international court for murder.
The Senate did not just protect Dela Rosa. It rewarded him.
Amnesty International was blunt. “It is imperative that regardless of politics, the process of justice prevails,” said Ritz Lee Santos III, Amnesty’s Philippines executive director. That is not a high bar. The Senate cleared it in the wrong direction.
How does an institution recover from something like this? The short answer is that it probably cannot — not quickly, and not without a serious reckoning from within. A chamber that cites NBI agents in contempt for serving an international warrant while sheltering the suspect has not simply bent the rules. It has announced, publicly and without apology, that the rules do not apply to its friends.
A Trial Being Strangled Before It Starts
To understand Monday fully, you have to pull back and look at what else happened that day, because Dela Rosa’s reappearance was not a coincidence. It was one piece of a larger move.
While the Senate was hiding Dela Rosa, the House of Representatives was voting — 257 to 25 — to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte for the second time, on charges of misusing public funds, unexplained wealth, and allegedly threatening the President’s life. The articles now go to the Senate for trial.
The Senate that will receive them is not the one that existed that morning.
Sotto, who had promised a fair and timely trial, was gone by noon. In his place: Cayetano, who served as Rodrigo Duterte’s foreign secretary and has deep ties to the family whose daughter now faces conviction. The math for Sara Duterte’s survival at a Senate trial suddenly got much friendlier — she needs only nine senators to block a guilty verdict, and several reliable Duterte votes are already in the chamber, including Dela Rosa himself.
Last year, the Senate delayed Sara Duterte’s first impeachment trial until the Supreme Court voided it on a technicality. The pattern is not hard to read. A sympathetic Senate president, a reorganized majority, a wanted senator handed a gavel — all assembled on the same afternoon the House sent its impeachment articles forward.
This is not politics as usual. This is a deliberate effort to make accountability impossible.
The Cost
The drug war killed tens of thousands of Filipinos. The ICC is the only institution that has moved decisively to hold its architects responsible. Dela Rosa, as the police chief who spearheaded Oplan Tokhang, the campaign’s primary operational arm, sits near the very top of that chain of command.
The court did not unseal this warrant quietly. It did so publicly — a signal that it wants him found and wants the pressure on. The same judges who ordered Duterte’s arrest ordered this one.
For the families of those killed in the drug war, Monday brought a strange mixture of hope and heartbreak. Hope, because the court is still reaching — accountability does not stop with the man at the top. Heartbreak, because the institution that should be enforcing the law spent the afternoon throwing a protective arm around one of the men the law is after.
Some institutions fail slowly. The Philippine Senate, on May 11, 2026, chose to fail in plain sight — loudly, brazenly, and with cameras rolling.
What happens next will say everything about whether this country still believes that justice means something. The Senate has already shown where it stands. (Rights Report Philippines)
