Efren Morillo was supposed to be dead. He was playing pool with friends in Quezon City, a suburb of Manila, in August 2016, when a group of men barged into the house. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but said they were police officers, and they told Morillo and his friends not to run. They ransacked the house looking for drugs, which the men insisted they did not have, then handcuffed them and led them out the back. Morillo, who was 28 and worked selling fruit and vegetables, was pushed into a room with his friend. One of the policemen raised his gun. “I have nothing to do with drugs,” Morillo protested. The officer shot him in the chest.
He fell to the floor, badly wounded but alive. There was another gunshot; his friend slumped down next to him. The policeman fired again, shooting his friend in the head. Other friends had been ordered to kneel on the ground and he could hear them pleading with the officers and crying. He heard more gunshots. Morillo closed his eyes, praying and trying not to move, as he waited for the police to leave. He could hear them suggesting that they should plant drugs in the house, said Rachel Chhoa-Howard, a south-east Asia researcher at Amnesty International who documented Morillo’s case as part of the organisation’s investigation into the wave of killings in the Philippines during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency.
Morillo managed to escape, making him one of the only survivors of a brutal campaign that prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) now say amounted to crimes against humanity. During Duterte’s first six months in power, beginning in June 2016, 34 people were killed, on average, every day. Extrajudicial killings became so common in the Philippines that they got their own shorthand, EJKs. Most of the victims, like Morillo, were poor. Some were shot dead inside their homes in front of their children. Others were gunned down in the street. Some of the bodies were found with their heads wrapped in packing tape, or with handwritten cardboard signs that said: “Don’t be a pusher and an addict like him.”
It did not matter that they had not been convicted of a crime. Just the suspicion that the person had used drugs seemed to be enough. Amnesty found evidence of police officers collecting payments for the killings, and paid killers who said they were hired by the police to shoot suspected offenders. The families of those killed would often find money, clothes, and religious statues missing from their homes. “There was a whole economy of murder,” Chhoa-Howard said. Officially, the government says 6,248 people were killed between 2016 and 2022. Human rights groups say the real figure is more like 30,000.
As international condemnation of the killings mounted, Duterte was defiant. “Sorry? Not sorry,” he told a cheering crowd of his supporters in December 2016. “You want to scare me by threatening to have me thrown in prison? International Criminal Court? Bullshit.” He treated the idea that he might one day be held to account as a punchline. When the ICC’s chief prosecutor announced in 2021 that there was enough evidence to open a formal investigation into Duterte, the president ridiculed the news as “crazy”. “I want to slap the judges there,” Duterte jeered. “You are fools.” He wasn’t laughing when he was arrested in Manila last month and told he would be transferred to The Hague.
Established in 2002, the ICC was intended to serve as a permanent international criminal tribunal to replace the ad-hoc UN-led inquiries into the war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Based in The Hague, in the Netherlands, the court currently has 125 member countries but has never been able to secure the involvement of major powers, such as China, Russia and the US. George W Bush halted the process of ratifying the statute to join in 2002 over concerns that US officials and soldiers could be sent to the court, although the US has periodically voted in favour of ICC investigations at the UN. In February, Donald Trump approved sanctions against ICC officials after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu; his administration also denounced an earlier investigation into alleged war crimes during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, which the ICC has since opted to “deprioritise”, focusing on the actions of the Taliban and Islamic State instead. The court has also been criticised by other states, such as South Africa, which has threatened to withdraw its membership several times, over accusations that it applies double standards that privilege the interests of Western powers.
The process of securing justice at The Hague has often been slow: there have been just 11 ICC convictions in its 23-year existence. Several defendants have died before the court reached its verdict. But the court’s defenders point to its high-profile convictions of figures such as the former Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) military leader, Bosco Ntaganda, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2019. Germain Katanga, a formal rebel leader in the DRC was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2014. Despite its shortcomings, the ICC remains the only international institution with the power to try individuals on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It is not hard to understand what drew the court’s attention to Duterte. He did not try to hide the killings that took place during his presidency, and when he was the mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines. He boasted about them. Human rights groups say he founded the Davao Death Squad, which targeted suspected drug dealers and criminals. He seemed to be proud of the nickname he had earned in Davao: “The Punisher”. While Duterte has denied there was a deliberate policy of extrajudicial killings, claiming they used justifiable force when the suspects fought back, he has bragged about riding a motorcycle around the city’s streets, “looking for a confrontation so I could kill”. As he told a group of business leaders in 2016: “In Davao, I used to do it personally. Just to show to the guys that if I can do it, why can’t you.”
Campaigning for the presidency, Duterte vowed to take his “war on drugs” nationwide. “I will do just what I did as mayor,” he declared at a huge rally in Manila ahead of the election in May 2016. “All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you.” There would be so many bodies, he said, that he would dump them into Manila Bay “and fatten all the fish there”. It was a winning message. Duterte, then 71, secured a victory at the polls. In his inauguration speech, he instructed his countrymen: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself.”
Despite his public bravado, Duterte took steps to protect himself from the threat of future prosecution. In 2018, when the ICC opened a preliminary investigation into the extrajudicial killings, he announced that he was withdrawing the country from the court. He also attempted to preserve his political influence. Presidents in the Philippines are constitutionally limited to serve a single six-year term and there was some concern as the end of Duterte’s term approached that he might try to stay in power, perhaps by changing the constitution or running as vice-president, which is elected by a separate ballot from the presidency. Instead, he agreed an alliance with the country’s powerful Marcos dynasty – something he believed would enable him to step down with impunity.
Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr is the son of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was forced into exile after a popular uprising against his corrupt and repressive rule in 1986, alongside his wife, Imelda, whose shoe collection became synonymous with the family’s extravagant lifestyle. But Bongbong Marcos later returned to the Philippines and built a political career as a congressman and a senator, seeking to rehabilitate the family name. In 2022, Marcos ran for president with Duterte’s daughter, 44-year-old Sara, as his prospective vice-president. They campaigned together under the slogan “Unity”, referring to themselves as the “UniTeam”. After combining their respective political strongholds in the north and south of the country, they won. At that point Sara was widely expected to run for the presidency, with Marcos’s support, in 2028. But whatever unity existed between the Marcos and Duterte families was fleeting.
Sara had made clear before the election that she wanted to be minister of defence as well as vice-president, but Marcos put her in charge of the much less powerful education ministry instead, which she said left her feeling “used”. He also began to publicly criticise her father’s “war on drugs” (although human rights groups note that while the killings slowed, they appear to have continued under Marcos’s rule). Sara resigned from the cabinet in the summer of 2024, though she remained vice-president. In November, she recorded a furious Facebook livestream calling Marcos and his allies “sons of bitches” and warning that they had “never faced an enemy like me”. She claimed that she had lined up an assassin to kill the president if anything happened to her. “I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM [Bongbong Marcos],” she said. “No joke.”
Sara was impeached by the House of Representatives in February on charges that included plotting to assassinate Marcos and large-scale corruption. If she is convicted by the Senate of the Philippines in June, she will be banned from running for public office. The more immediate consequence of the spectacular Marcos-Duterte rupture, however, was that it removed any incentive for Marcos to shield his predecessor from the investigation that was gathering pace at the ICC.
Despite Duterte’s decision to withdraw the Philippines from the ICC, which took effect in 2019, prosecutors argued they still had jurisdiction to investigate the allegations against him during his first three years as president and as mayor of Davao, dating back to when the country joined the court in 2011. Even as Marcos initially indicated he did not plan to cooperate with the ICC, the investigation continued in the Netherlands. In February 2025, the court issued an arrest warrant for Duterte on allegations of crimes against humanity, including indirect involvement in murder. On 7 March the warrant was transmitted to Interpol, to which the Philippines still belongs. Explaining his subsequent decision to hand over his political rival, Marcos has insisted that since the request came from Interpol, he had no choice but to honour it, “as the leader of a democratic country that is part of the community of nations”.
Duterte was in Hong Kong, rallying his overseas supporters ahead of midterm elections in May, when he heard that the warrant had been issued. “These motherf**kers have been chasing me for a long time,” he announced on stage during a rally on 9 March. “What did I do wrong?” Duterte’s inner circle debated whether he should stay in Hong Kong. (As China is not a member of the ICC, the authorities in Hong Kong would not arrest him on the court’s account.) But his team eventually settled on a plan to try to obscure his return to the Philippines by booking multiple flights to Manila on 11 March and arriving eight hours earlier than they had announced, according to officials who spoke to the New York Times.
Yet when Duterte’s plane landed at Manila’s main airport, the arrivals hall was swarming with police. An officer boarded the plane to inform Duterte that he would be arrested. “You will just have to kill me,” he responded. “I won’t allow it if you’re taking the ICC’s side.” When it came down to it, however, he did not offer much resistance, allowing himself to be escorted to the presidential lounge at a nearby air base, where he reportedly dined on barbecued meat and drank Coke. Then an officer read him his rights, advising him that he was being arrested on a warrant from the ICC for crimes against humanity, and that he had the right to remain silent and to legal counsel of his choice. It was more than any of his alleged victims had been offered. Duterte, who appeared frail and often walks with a stick, was then helped up the steps on to a waiting private jet to be transported to the Netherlands.
On board the plane, Duterte uploaded a final video to his Facebook account. “I am about to land in The Hague,” he said. “I’m OK. Do not worry. I think this has something to do with the law and order back then.” He insisted he would take responsibility for “whatever happened in the past… I will continue to serve my country, and so be it if that is my destiny.”
Duterte appeared by video link for his first hearing at the ICC on 14 March. (His lawyer claimed he was too ill to attend the court in person.) The swaggering strongman who had once revelled in his expletive-laden tirades against the ICC was gone. Instead, the former president, who turned 80 in custody, sat quietly, wearing a blue suit that was too big for him, as he confirmed that he understood the charges against him. That moment represented a “big step towards justice for the families of the victims in the Philippines”, said Chhoa-Howard, the Amnesty researcher. He now faces a long legal process and a trial that could take years to complete. If convicted, he could receive a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. But his detention already sends a powerful message to other leaders who now believe themselves to be above the law, that they might still one day have to answer to it. The Philippine ex-president is only the second former leader in the court’s history to be handed over by his own countrymen to the ICC. (Laurent Gbagbo, the former Côte d’Ivoire president, was the first.) He will surely not be the last.
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu currently have arrest warrants outstanding at the ICC. The latter decided to test the limits of that warrant on 3 April, when he travelled to Hungary, a founding member of the ICC. But instead of arresting him, his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orbán welcomed him with a military parade and announced he was withdrawing Hungary from the ICC, which he condemned as a “political court”. Although, as Duterte’s case has proved, even withdrawing does not render the court completely powerless.
Yet perhaps the most important lesson other strongmen will take from Duterte’s downfall is that the real mistake was to step down in the first place. Rather than trusting their freedom to a successor who could one day put them on their own plane to The Hague, it is far safer simply to hold on to power. The arrest of a man who repeatedly scoffed at the notion that he would ever be held to account only underlines the perils of stepping down for an autocrat, and the danger that justice might, eventually, catch up with them too. In the end, the idea that Duterte might see out his days in a prison cell turned out not to be such bullshit after all.
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025