CRIMINAL CASE Jude Josue Sabio (right), lawyer for confessed hit man Edgar Matobato (left), files a 77-page criminal complaint against President Duterte and 11 others in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands. —CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Lawmakers who are allies of President Rodrigo Duterte defended the Chief Executive from a complaint for crimes against humanity filed before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
The criminal complaint is going to the trash bin because the ICC is a court of last resort, Kabayan Rep. Harry Roque said in a statement, calling the ICC complaint “premature, suspect and bound to fail.”
The ICC, of which the Philippines is a state party, is the court of last resort, and a petitioner may only file a case before the ICC after exhausting all legal remedies in the home country.
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“The Principle of Complementarity provides that the ICC will only exercise jurisdiction when Philippine courts are unwilling or unable to do so. There are various remedies available within our legal framework that have yet to be exhausted,” Roque said.
Roque lamented that the criminal complaint was filed just as the country is set to host the Asean summit, obviously intended to discredit the administration.
“Thus, it appears that the filing of this letter at this moment is an attempt to discredit the President and the Philippine government as the ASEAN Summit begins. It is regrettable how maneuvers like this to cast a negative light upon the Philippines have become more and more common,” Roque said.
Davao City Rep. Karlo Nograles said the ICC complaint was only intended to destabilize the government and weaken the public support for the President.
“The case filed against the President in the ICC, as most Filipinos know, is the latest step in the destabilization plot against the Duterte administration. This is complete waste of time because any lawyer would say there is no basis to prosecute the President for alleged crimes against humanity,” Nograles said.
He said the complaint has no clear evidence, adding that it is a case of forum shopping because the impeachment complaint against Duterte for his alleged role in extrajudicial killings is bound to fail.
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“Clearly, those who seek to topple President Duterte are forum-shopping for a court sympathetic to their complaint. If they can’t get the President impeached by Congress, then they can use that as reason to appeal to the ICC to take cognizance of their complaint,” Nograles said.
“In other words, since they know they don’t stand a chance in Congress, they have just gone to the ICC in advance,” he added.
Surigao Del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers said the ICC complaint is nothing more than an attempt for the complainant Atty. Jude Sabio to get his three minutes of fame at the expense of the President.
“Note that no single piece of evidence was offered to directly link the accused to the commission of the crimes being charged against them,” Barbers said, noting that A Sabio offered as evidence the findings of the Human Rights Watch even though the latter was not a fact-finding body.
In his 77-page complaint, Sabio cited the “continuing mass murder” in the Philippines due to the thousands of Filipinos killed in Duterte’s anti-drug campaign that started when he was Davao City mayor and continues now that he is President.
READ: Duterte, 11 others accused of crimes against humanity before ICC
“Your favorable action on this matter would not only serve the noble ends of international criminal justice, but would also be the beginning of the end of this dark, obscene, murderous and evil era in the Philippines,” Sabio said.
Sabio said the 7,000 drug-related killings in the Philippines in the past seven months have surpassed the 3,000 killings during the two decade martial law regime of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
The police has contested the 7,000 figure, noting that only around 2,600 drug pushers and users were killed in legitimate police operations.
READ: PNP corrects ‘kill list’ figures, but it’s not 7,000
Sabio in filing the ICC complaint represented Edgar Matobato, a self-confessed member of the Davao Death Squad who admitted to killing drug suspects in Davao City upon Duterte’s orders.
Matobato has testified in a Senate inquiry about Duterte’s alleged order for the vigilante group Davao Death Squad to kill drug criminals in Davao City when Duterte was mayor.
Also included in the complaint are Duterte’s closest allies – Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre, Philippine National Police chief Ronald Dela Rosa, Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, Senators Richard Gordon and Alan Peter Cayetano, Solicitor General Jose Calida, former Interior secretary Ismael Sueno, among others.
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