Duterte in the Dock: A Landmark Arrest

Host: Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. He made it his mission to rid the country of drugs. 

Duterte: My campaign against drugs will not stop, until the last pusher and the last drug lord are (mimics sound of throat being slit, applause) 

Host: Duterte’s war on drugs had a lot of casualties. 

Maria: Within four hours of Duterte taking his oath of office, the first killing happened. In 2016, an average of eight dead bodies a night. 

Host:  In his six years as president, it has been estimated that the Philippine police and their agents killed anywhere between 12 and 30 thousand drug suspects. 

Carlos: Without due process, often in the dead of night, the police would, raid homes, arrest suspects, uh, shoot them down. And even in some instances, plant evidence against them to justify the killings. 

Host: Human Rights Watch spent years documenting the extra-judiicial killings. 

HRW video: [Tagolog speaker] Translation: They showed us a photograph of the body, exactly how we found it, last night, but without a gun laying next to it. 

Host: The sheer scope of the killings got the attention of international media. Reuters won a Pulitzer for its reporting. The New York Times also won a Pulitzer, for its photography. Filipina/American journalist Maria Ressa even won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression during Duterte’s drug war... 

Maria: The first casualty in the Philippines battle for facts is the exact number of people killed in this brutal drug war. 

Host: Yet in spite of the great reporting, and all the international attention ... when Durterte left office in 2022 he was very popular. He seemed untouchable. So a lot of Filipinos, including Duterte, were caught off guard on March 11th, 2025. 

Deutche Welle: Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has been arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant for Crimes Against Humanity. 

BBC: Local media saying Mr. Duterte has been seen boarding a plane in Manila... 

Deutche Welle: The ICC has been investigating the mass killings that happened during Duterte’s crackdown on illegal drugs.  

Carlos: So when the arrest happened, it was like total shock for everybody.  

Host: Is justice on the way for the victims and their families? What does Duterte’s arrest mean for other leaders with ICC warrants out for their arrest, like Russia's Vladimir Putin and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu? 

This is Rights & Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch. I'm Ngofen Mputubwele. I am a writer, a lawyer, and a radio producer. Human Rights Watch asked me to look at human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of people on the front lines of history. 

This week, the arrest of Rodrigo Duterte. 

We're going to look at what he’s accused of, how he was arrested, and what his detention means for international justice. 

Ngofeen: First question as always, , who are you and what do you do? 

Carlos: Yeah, so I am Carlos Conde. I'm, the Philippines researcher for Human Rights watch. I've been in this job for 13 years now. 

Host: Before Human Rights Watch, Carlos worked as a journalist. And he often found himself writing about a former prosecutor turned mayor by the name of Rodrigo Duterte. 

Carlos: Incidentally, many of the years that he was mayor of Davao at the time, I was also based there as a journalist reporting for, uh, the New York Times. 

Host: Davao City, the third biggest city in the Philippines, is in the South. Duterte was mayor there from 1988 to 2016, with a few short breaks in that long tenure. Extrajudicial killings of suspected drug offenders seem to have started in Davao City during his first term, in the mid-1990s. 

Carlos: The killings of suspected criminals were so rampant that there were hundreds, even thousands who were, who were killed when he was mayor there. 

Host: Hundreds. Thousands. Those are numbers, and getting the numbers right is important, as we'll hear about later. But as a journalist, Carlos had to tell stories. And one of those stories belonged to a woman by the name of Clarita Alia... 

Minda News/Clarita Alia: [voice in Tagalog, fade under] 

Carlos: Clarita Alia at the time and still to today, she was a vegetable vendor in a public market in Davao City. So she goes around the city pushing her vegetable cart, selling vegetables. It was a tough, uh, job, uh, livelihood to do, and she's still doing that. 

Host: Twenty some years ago she was separated from her husband, so more or less a single mom. With 4 kids. 4 boys. Teenagers. 

Carlos: Her children, and this is something that she herself would admit, were not saints as, uh, she says they committed some crimes, uh, petty crimes. They were accused of, you know, just being, in the streets, making trouble, basically just thugging. 

Host: On July 21st, 2001, the Davoa police murdered her son Richard. 

Clarita Alie: October... October 20, 2001 

Host: That same year, on October 20, they murdered Christopher. 

Clarita Alie: November 3  

Host: Then, two years later, on November 3rd, 2003 they murdered Bobby. And then, four years later, they murdered Fernando. 

Carlos: The last one was in 2007. She told me that she tried to be as normal as possible. But what really crushed her in Davao all these years was the way her neighbors treated her. She said that they were accusing me of not being a good mother. They were accusing me that I allowed my children to be what they are. And that was why they were targeted. They weren't questioning why they were being killed to begin with, why they were literally being slaughtered like pigs in the market. It was really difficult. I mean, I have to admit, I was pretty much crying while we were talking. 

Host: Over the years, Carlos has interviewed Clarita Alia many times. Not only because of her tragic story but because Clarita Alia did something very brave... 

Carlos: So, when her children were being killed, one after the other, she spent practically all of her life since then, trying to build up cases for her children. So, she filed complaints before the Commission in Human Rights. She filed complaints with the prosecutors in Davaos city. She filed complaints with the police, but none of it really mattered. In fact, about, the only thing good that came out was that one of the police officers that she said was involved in the murders of one of her children had been demoted. 

Host: Now there's official justice, which Clarita Alia was not getting, and then there's the court of public opinion. At great risk to her own safety Clarita Alia made her case to the public, giving interviews to journalists like Carlos and to anyone willing to listen. 

Carlos: Now I remember what Ms. Aliyah told Reuters in 2006, I think it was when they did a profile on her, and she warned at the time that if Mr. Duterte ever gets elected president, blood will flow in the streets of the Philippines. 

Newsreel/WSJ: Hard line anti-crime mayor Rodrigo Duterte is poised to become the next president of the Phillipines... 

Newsreel/BBC: Millions of people bought into his promises to get tough on crime, to be a man of action, a man to get things done, pointing to his experience down in the city of Davao... 

WSJ: His pledge to kill criminals and end corruption had nationwide appeal. Duterte: Either you kill me or I will kill you... 

BBC: There are others, though, particularly those more concerned about the rule of law, about human rights, who are deeply, deeply alarmed by the kinds of things he's said. 

Host: That alarm apparently didn’t translate into votes. So how did Duterte win over 40% of Filipino voters in 2016 and become president, even with  his well-documented record of extrajudicial killings? Carlos has one explanation... 

Carlos: He projected Davoa as kind of a Singapore in the Philippines. So if you can imagine that the Philippines being a third world, very poor country and then here's, here comes somebody who markets his city as the golden, uh, kind of the, the gold standard in terms of governance. Uh, that was a very attractive proposition for a lot of Filipinos. That's why many believed him. And so, Davao admittedly, was a very efficient city during his time as mayor, but there were a lot of killings. 

He sold the idea that he's going to replicate it across the Philippines, and that's exactly what happened. The problem is that the Philippines did not become Singapore when he became president, uh, because, you know, a lot of killings were happening, a lot of corruption was still happening. 

Uh, rule of law was kind of just, you know, it went down the drain. 

Al Jazeera: It’s been just 16 days since Rodrigo Duterte was sworn in as the 16th President of the Philippines. In that time, thousands of people have been killed in his war on drugs, something he makes no apologies for. 

CNN: Duterte has admitted to personally shooting 3 people he calls criminals. 

France24: In this so called war on drugs, over 7 thousand have been killed... 

Al Jazeera: 5 men killed tonight. 5 more to add to the tally of death in the Philippines. 

ANC24-7: Was the war truly aimed at dismantling the drug syndicates, or was it an all out assault on the poor? 

Host: Imagine you're a journalist in this situation. Your country has elected a man who openly brags about all the "criminals" he's killed in the city where he was mayor. As president, he keeps killing, but now on a national scale. You report on all this extra-judicial killing, and that president, he doesn't like what you're doing. What do you, as a journalist, do? 

Maria: I mean, you, you just keep going. You have to hold onto the facts regardless. 'cause the first attempt was to intimidate journalists. 

Host: This again is Maria Ressa. Maria had spent nearly two decades working as a lead investigative reporter for CNN and was for a time CNN's bureau chief in Manila. She'd also headed the news division of ABS-CBN, the Philipine's largest broadcast news service. In 2011, she co-founded Rappler, a news website. I wanted to know, what was Rappler's approach when it came to Duterte's drug war? 

Maria: What we did was we watched the numbers. So, the Philippine National Police by the end of 2016, had a death toll that was over 7,000. But by the beginning of 2017, they just rolled it back to 2000 something. 

Host: In other words, in the first year of Duterte's presidency, the government admitted it had killed 7000 people, but then they said, no, got it wrong, that number is now 2000. 

Maria: And they expected every media group to follow and. What we did, which got us targeted was we maintained and showed when it was rolled back, and showed how much further it was rolled back. The first casualty in the Philippines battle for facts is the exact number of people killed in this brutal drug war, right? 

Host: As Maria said, she, and Rappler, were targeted by Duterte. She was even arrested for "cyberlibel" and has spent a lot of time and money fending off other politically motivated charges. 

Maria: I would wake up and at times , president Duterte would've like, he, he does a, like a midnight press conference and I'd wake up to the attacks that he had when a president of a country attacks one person This is asymmetrical warfare. 

When the president of the country lies repeatedly that lie seeps into public consciousness. Yeah. Right. So what's our role? Our role is our responsibility to the public Good. It's always been facts. Facts have never been debated. The reason they are is because of technology. 

Host: When you talk to Maria Ressa about Duterte and other authoritarian leaders, this is something she keeps coming back to. Technology... and by technology she means social media and the algorithms that govern it... technology is destroying the shared reality that good journalism tries to create. You know, facts. You can do the most accurate journalism in the world, but that doesn't mean it's going to make it into people's minds. Because, says Maria Ressa, it has to compete with massive quantities of disinformation. 

Maria: In 2016, Duterte was elected., Brexit happened , by November, Donald Trump had his first term in office, and in each one of these, there was data that showed insidious manipulation. Election interference on social media. Technology, social media enabled the rise of these populist authoritarians. 

Host: So for Maria Ressa and other journalists, for Carlos Conde and other human rights investigators, for Clarita Alia and the families of victims trying to get the truth about what was happening in the Philippines and hold Duterte accountable, it was an uphill battle. It may have even looked hopeless. Yet now, Duterte is in the Hague awaiting trial. How that happened, after the break. 

[ad break] 

Host: The International Criminal Court or ICC is in the Netherlands, in a city called The Hague. Earlier this year we did a whole episode about the ICC, with one of the lawyers who was there in Rome at its birth back in the 1990s. 

Richard: Well, I'm an old guy.  

Host: Richard Dicker is the founder of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. What I learned about the ICC from Richard includes a few things that help explain how and why Duterte was arrested. 

One: The ICC only investigates only four crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the crime of aggression. 

Richard: For example, crimes against humanity, uh, murder on a widespread or systematic basis carried out against a civilian population as a result of a state or organization policy. 

Host: Two: The ICC is a court of last resort. 

Richard: when these crimes happen in a country, 

Ngofeen: Genocide. 

Richard: Genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, when those crimes take place, it really is, first and foremost, the responsibility of the state in place to investigate and prosecute those, deemed to be responsible, all right? Court of last resort. They don't just step in and start investigating and prosecuting. They only do that if the national authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. 

Host: The ICC doesn't have jurisdiction everywhere. For example, the U.S. and some other major countries never signed on to the treaty, significantly limiting the court’s reach. Listen to that episode if you want to hear more about that. In any case, the Philippines signed the treaty in 2011, before Duterte was president. And in 2018, Duterte took the Philippines out of the ICC, a decision that officially took effect in 2019, and the court now has jurisdiction over crimes committed in the Philippines up to then. 

Vignoli: He is charged with the alleged crimes against humanity of murder, between. 2011 and 2019. 

Host: This is Maria Elena Vignoli,  a senior counsel in the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch... 

Vignoli: Where I focus mostly on the international criminal court. 

Host: So, what exactly happened on March 11?  

Vignoli: Duterte was arrested by the Philippines authorities on this arrest, warrants by the ICC, uh, that was then sent to, to Interpol. He was arrested in, uh, in Manila at, at the airport. 

Host: Duterte was coming back to Manila from Hong Kong, where he appeared at a rally. But let me unpack what Maria Elena Vignoli just said. The ICC issued an arrest warrant and sent it to Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. Interpol doesn’t have police officers and it doesn’t make arrests, but it does share information on wanted persons with its 195 member countries. It was Interpol that asked for cooperation from Filipino authorities to make the arrest. 

Vignoli: And, uh, it was a very tense moment because he was, uh, first arrested and, and detained there at the airport. 

And then for a while everyone was watching and monitoring, and no one was a hundred percent sure whether he was gonna be put on a plane, and then was the plane going to leave?  

Host: Duterte had landed in Manila around 9:30 a.m...  

Vignoli: ...and then eventually at, uh, around 11:00 PM an aircraft that, , was carrying, , Deterte left Manila Airport for the Hague. 

Host: The important thing to remember here is that the Philippines was no longer a member of the ICC. So why did Filipino authorities make the arrest? Politics, says Carlos Conde... 

Carlos: You have to keep in mind, Ngofeen, that this is something that has never happened in the Philippines before. Mr. Duterte still, is very popular, extremely popular. Uh, and for the, six years he was in office, he kind of cultivated this image that he was untouchable, that the government is afraid of him, so it'll never dare do something like this. The problem of course, that he and his daughter, Sara, who's the vice president, had had a falling out with the Marcos family and the administration of President Marcos, they used to be allies. Uh, but they had a falling out a year before, and so this kind of, uh, contributed to that. There was all this confluence of, you know, events that led to this. 

Host: So the current president of the Philippines, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, and the Marcos family were feuding with Duterte and his daughter Sara, who is as we speak the current vice president. And then this arrest warrant arrives. What to do? 

Carlos: Apparently the government was already prepared with, uh, what is essentially, in my view, uh, a well laid out plan or trap to arrest him, um, with, uh, kind of explicit, uh, rationale that this was in compliance with, uh, uh, uh, arrest warrant issued, not by the ICC directly, but by the Interpol. 

Because keep in mind, Ngofeen, that the Marco administration did not want to recognize the international criminal court because we are already out of, uh, the ICC. So they were very careful in the language. 

Before all of this, the Philippine government was very adamant in their position that they were not going to cooperate with ICC, um, that they did not recognize the ICC. 

So when the arrest happened by the Interpol, it was like, you know, total shock for everybody because we didn't expect this to happen this quickly. 

And I was monitoring all of this from, uh, uh, from my place, you know, glued to the TV and the radio and just watching the things unfold. 

Vignoli: I mean, I was stunned to be honest. The significance of his arrest is, is massive. Well, first and foremost for, you know, for the Philippines, the struggle to bring to justice, you know, perpetrators of the drug war. 

Uh, it's really been a long, uh, a long struggle. 

Maria: I think the best part about the Philippines is that we continued and succeeded. The families didn't give up. The journalists kept working, human rights groups kept working, right? I think the signal it sent on March 11 is that impunity ends. That you can at some point feel a sense of justice. To see Rodrigo Duterte arrested for alleged crimes against humanity, the first Filipino president to have ever been charged with this, and then to see him at the Hague now awaiting trial, just that alone is the first step to giving some sense of justice. 

Host: For Clarita Alia, the news of Duterte's arrest was bittersweet. 

Carlos: The, the murder of her children are not part of the Crimes Against Humanity case in the ICC because they occurred when the country was still not part of the ICC. She was really sad, but also very happy. She told me that this was happening because she had been fighting for this from the very beginning, since 2001. And this is from my perspective as his human rights watch researcher, this is pretty much the best piece of news that has ever happened to this country since Mr. Duterte became president in 2016, 

Vignoli: The case against Duterte seeing him in the Hague really shows the importance of the ICC as a court of last resort, a court that stands for equality before the law and, and really has the potential to reach even those like Duterte that, um, you know, themselves think to be, uh, untouchable. 

Host: Duterte is now sitting in jail in the Hague. In late September there’ll be a hearing to decide whether or not to confirm the charges against him and send him to trial. There’s still a long way to go. 

Meanwhile, the ICC has outstanding arrest warrants against a number of other individuals, including powerful leaders like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. What message does Duterte’s case send them?... 

Vignoli: I mean to individuals wanted any individual wanted by the court, it really sends this message, this warning message, that one day they too may face justice. The machinery of international justice may take time and, and they may think of themselves as untouchable, as beyond the reach of the law, but it's, it's a warning sign for them. That they too may, may find themselves on the docket. 

Host: You can read a lot more about the arrest of Rodrigo Duterte and the drug war in the Philippines on Human Rights Watch’s website. The archival clips in this episode are from Deutsche Welle, BBC, the Wall Street Journal, ABS-CBN, Minda News, 60 Minutes Australia, Al Jazeera, CNN, France 24, and ANC24-7. 

You’ve been listening to Rights & Wrongs from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Sophie Soloway is the associate producer. Ifé Fatunase and Stacy Sullivan are the executive producers. Thanks also to Anthony Gale.  

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. I’ll be back with another episode in two weeks. Thanks for listening!