Will Congress let the ICC in?

There’s going to be a monumental shift in official policy if the House of Representatives approves resolutions calling on government to allow the International Criminal Court to enter the country and investigate the Duterte administration’s bloody war on illegal drugs from 2016 to 2019.

Last week, the joint committees on human rights and justice started hearings on the issue.

During a recent plenary, the chamber read HR 1477 on first reading and referred it to the committee on justice.

This took place amid the word war of the House with former president Rodrigo Duterte, who tagged the chamber as a “rotten institution” after it removed the P650 million in confidential fund of his daughter, Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte.

These are actually three resolutions: HR 1477 authored by Congressmen Benny Abante and Ramon Rodrigo Gutierrez; HR 1393 sponsored by the Makabayan bloc; and HR 1482, filed by Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman who manifested during the hearing that the government “must cooperate with ICC” or else the country “will be a renegade in the community of nations.”

The ICC investigation will cover crimes committed in the Philippines after we acceded to the Rome Statute creating the ICC on Nov. 1, 2011 until March 16, 2019, when the country’s withdrawal from the Rome statute took effect.

On April 24, 2017, “a verified complaint” was filed against Duterte and others for “purportedly committing crimes against humanity following Duterte’s campaign against dealers and users of illegal drugs.”

The complaint, Lagman pointed out, was filed when the ICC still had jurisdiction.”

Sen. Imee Marcos has expressed strong opposition to the House resolutions urging the government to cooperate with the ICC probe on the drug war killings during the previous administration, claiming allowing the ICC to conduct a probe is tantamount to surrendering the country’s sovereignty.

But as pointed out by legal experts, we already surrender part of our sovereignty by acceding to international treaties where we agree to comply with its provisions.

Then there’s the view that our justice system is functioning, so why let a foreign entity meddle in our affairs?

But that view is contradicted by the fact that with more than 6,000 officially admitted victims of Duterte’s war on drugs, the courts have rendered verdicts on only two cases of wrongful deaths from police operations from 2016 to 2023.

If that’s the case, then Congress has the moral duty to put an end to the culture of impunity by letting the ICC conduct a full-dress probe of Duterte and company for the bloody war on drugs that human rights groups here and abroad claim has targeted no less than 20,000 to 30,000 victims.

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