How did House quad comm fare in handling Citizen Duterte?

Former President Rodrigo Duterte attends the House quad committee hearing on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024. (Photo from House of Representatives Media Bureau)

The House quad committee investigating the war on drugs took a notably different approach from the Senate’s own inquiry due in large part to its leadership’s tight leash on the proceedings and its members’ sharper and more relevant questions, according to observers.

These factors, said University of the Philippines political science professor Jean Encinas-Franco and human rights lawyer Neri Colmenares, a former House member himself, helped elicit incriminating statements from former President Rodrigo Duterte.

Duterte said he would assume full responsibility for his brutal antidrug campaign that killed more than 6,000 people and dared the International Criminal Court (ICC) to speed up its investigation of the charges against him.

“It seems the House leadership handled it better because they did not simply kowtow to Duterte,” said Encinas-Franco.

READ: Ex-president Duterte shows up at House quad comm drug war hearing

She said quad committee chair and Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers already was aware of how the Senate hearing went, “so he had the benefit of hindsight, and at the outset, he was firm about the rules: no curse words, no side comments.”

Tight leash

Barbers, as the four-committee lead chair, kept a tight leash on the 14-hour hearing by insisting on imposing strict parliamentary rules, including forbidding anyone from speaking without permission from the chair.

He also suspended the proceedings when things got heated and turned off Duterte’s microphone whenever the former president went astray.

These moves seemed to subdue the volatile 79-year-old to the point that he had to apologize to the panel, saying he was “not trying to be smart-aleck.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose. I respect you. I’m just a bit emotional whenever it comes to crime; it really angers me,” Duterte explained.

Nevertheless, the committee did not totally suppress the “Duterte-brand” mannerisms, Encinas-Franco said, referring to how he gestured to punch former Sen. Leila de Lima and grabbed a microphone as if to strike former Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, his two staunchest critics who sat to his left.

“If the intention was to weaken Duterte’s hold on his base, I doubt it did anything to sway them,” she said, adding that the committee “probably got everything they could ever get from his side.”

“It’s time to look for other resource persons who can corroborate his testimony or risk overexposing him to the public,” she said.

Colmenares noted that the questions were more pointed and more relevant.

“Taking into account all his admissions, all this will firm up the case before the ICC,” he said. “Now it is up to the ICC to take stock of what he said and move forward with its investigation.”

It was Duterte’s exchanges with Gabriela Rep. Arlene Brosas, Laguna Rep. Dan Fernandez, Kabataan Rep. Raoul Manuel, Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro, and 1-Rider Rep. Rodge Gutierrez where he made the most self-incriminating statements.

‘Six or seven’ kills

These included, among others, that he personally killed “six or seven” suspected criminals when he was Davao City mayor, that there was indeed a reward system for police officers in the drug war, and that he planted evidence as city prosecutor. He said that he would assume responsibility “but not guilt” for the thousands killed in his drug war.

Colmenares, who serves as legal counsel for the families of victims of extrajudicial killings who filed complaints of crimes against humanity against Duterte in the ICC, is not very optimistic about the families themselves using his admissions to file a case in local courts.

During the hearing, Luistro said the quad committee was ready to recommend charging Duterte with violating Republic Act No. 9851 on crimes against international humanitarian law.

But such a case, Colmenares said, might be better filed by the Department of Justice or the Office of the Solicitor General than the families of the victims, as many of them were being threatened and harassed and also had trouble obtaining documents to file cases on their own. “Remember that that was the reason they even turned to the ICC in the first place,” he said.

READ: Quad comm won’t allow ICC to access its drug war hearing transcript 

But the quad committee members themselves are unconvinced that the ICC was the legal way to go.

“I still stand with the position that the ICC should not interfere here because our justice system was still working,” Fernandez said at a press conference on Thursday.

He said he was standing by their pronouncements that “we will not freely give our documents to them.”

Barbers said the committee would draft a final report recommending the filing of charges, but he did not specify what these would be.

The mothers of the drug war victims were barely assuaged by the hearing, their fifth time attending the House inquiry and their first to see Duterte in person.

Finally, she meets him

Christine Pascual, the mother of 18-year-old Joshua Laxamana, who was killed by the police in 2016, said she would have never imagined that she would ever have the chance to confront him.

“This was the moment we’ve been waiting for, to finally meet him and not just to air our grievances to the media. This was our chance to tell it to his face,” she said. “But honestly, my chest felt heavier because it’s clear that he toyed with the lives of our loved ones.”

Maryann Domingo, whose partner Luis and son Gabriel were killed by Caloocan cops in 2016, said it felt surreal that he was “in front of us and he made all those admissions repeatedly, but he showed no remorse at all.”

“I asked myself, is this what justice looks like? It seemed he was freely admitting his crimes because he was confident nothing would ever happen to him,” she said in an interview. “This was supposed to be a moment of vindication for us … but when I was finally face-to-face with him, I felt like I was the one who lost.”