The Philippines\u2019 solicitor general has urged the Supreme Court to reject a legal attempt by fugitive \u200cSenator Ronald \u201cBato\u201d dela Rosa seeking to block his arrest and extradition to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.<\/p>\n
On May 11, the ICC unsealed a warrant<\/a> dated November 6 for Dela Rosa\u2019s arrest, charging him with crimes against humanity linked to former President Rodrigo Duterte\u2019s bloody \u201cwar on drugs.\u201d Dela Rosa subsequently fled<\/a> into his office in the Senate, before slipping out of the building before dawn \u200bon Thursday. His whereabouts are currently unknown.<\/p>\n The senator also filed three petitions to the Supreme \u200bCourt, requesting that it stop authorities from arresting him and surrendering him to the ICC.<\/p>\n In a 74-page comment<\/a> filed on Saturday and made public yesterday, the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) \u200bdescribed Dela Rosa as a \u201cfugitive\u201d and argued that his bid lacks any legal basis.<\/p>\n The OSG stated that the Philippines \u201cwill never become a sanctuary for impunity for the narrow and universally condemned class of atrocities known as crimes against humanity,\u201d and added that the country may enforce the ICC warrant under a domestic law, Republic Act 9851, which allows authorities to surrender suspects accused of grave international crimes to international courts for prosecution.<\/p>\n It said that Dela Rosa was not entitled to relief because his \u201cactions show that \u200che comes \u2060to court with unclean hands.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHis flight, coupled with the fact that he had previously gone into hiding, is not merely incidental but is a deliberate act to avoid accountability,\u201d the OSG added. \u201cHis conduct places him squarely within the definition of a fugitive from justice.\u201d<\/p>\n Dela Rosa is wanted by the ICC for his prominent role in the anti-drug campaign, which raged throughout Duterte\u2019s six years in office (2016-2022). Estimates of the number killed during the campaign range from an official estimate of around 6,000<\/a> to as many as 30,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n If arrested, he would join his former boss, Duterte, who was arrested in March 2025 and extradited to the ICC for his role in the campaign. The 81-year-old former president is set to stand trial after a pretrial panel last month ruled<\/a> that there were \u201csubstantial grounds\u201d to believe that he was guilty of crimes against humanity. It has long been expected that Dela Rosa would be next in line, and prior to last week\u2019s dramatic events, he had not appeared in public since November.<\/p>\n The standoff over Dela Rosa is the latest instalment in the serial political feud between Duterte\u2019s family and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his former ally, which has raged since the two political clans fell out during the course of 2024.<\/p>\n Indeed, Dela Rosa resurfaced on May 11 in order to cast his vote for a \u201cleadership coup\u201d<\/a> in the Senate, which deposed the chamber\u2019s president and replaced him with Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, an ally of the Dutertes.<\/p>\n This took place on the same day as Duterte\u2019s daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, was impeached for the second time<\/a> by a House of Representatives dominated by allies of the Marcoses. She is accused of a long list of alleged transgressions, including corruption, misuse of government funds, and plotting to kill Marcos, his wife, and his cousin, then speaker of the House of Representatives, during a livestream in November 2024.<\/p>\n It is widely assumed that the Senate \u201ccoup\u201d was intended to block or frustrate Duterte\u2019s upcoming impeachment trial, which is set to take place soon in the Senate. If impeached by a two-thirds vote, Duterte would be removed from office and banned from politics for life, although it is likely that the Dutertes have enough allies<\/a> in the upper house to forestall a conviction.<\/p>\n The impeachment struggle is now likely to take place in parallel with the government\u2019s attempt to enforce the ICC\u2019s arrest warrant against Dela Rosa, which Justice Minister Fredderick Vida said on Friday<\/a> the country would \u201cdefinitely\u201d honor. The latter would almost certainly not have happened were it not for the deterioration in the relationship between the Marcoses and Dutertes, who allied to great effect for the 2022 presidential election.<\/p>\n After coming to office, Marcos initially called on the ICC to drop the case against Duterte and asserted that it had no jurisdiction over the Philippines, but as his relationship with Duterte soured, he reconsidered his opposition to the case. When the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Duterte in February 2025, he authorized police to execute it, removing a key political rival from the fray. He is presumably hoping similarly that the arrest and extradition of Dela Rosa would help weaken the Duterte camp ahead of the 2028 presidential election, for which Sara Duterte has already declared her candidacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, even that would be insufficient to finally conclude the political feud that has dominated politics in the Philippines over the past two years. Provided that Sara Duterte survives her impeachment trial, she will focus her energies on the 2028 election \u2013 and the possibility of raining down revenge on her enemies at the presidential office in the Malaca\u00f1ang Palace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Philippines\u2019 solicitor general has urged the Supreme Court to reject a legal attempt by fugitive \u200cSenator Ronald…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[5009,9048,9049,4999,11919,11920,11921,802,2048,9051,7107,8812,7678,42],"class_list":["post-14282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-hague","tag-ferdinand-marcos-jr","tag-icc-philippines-investigation","tag-international-criminal-court-icc","tag-philippines","tag-philippines-2028-election","tag-philippines-politics","tag-philippines-war-on-drugs","tag-politics","tag-rodrigo-duterte","tag-ronald-dela-rosa","tag-sara-duterte","tag-sara-duterte-impeachment","tag-southeast-asia","tag-the-hague"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}