It’s final, the Philippines is not rejoining the International Criminal Court (ICC). This is the blunt statement of President. Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. to the folly of the opposition for the country to revive its ties with the ICC.
The curt response of President Marcos to Sen. Koko Pimentel’s lunacy demonstrated his courage to face the overbearing members of the ICC to assert its authority on a sovereign nation that has a functioning judicial system.
In the process of gaining elusive points in his declining political career, Senator Pimentel, who is a lawyer, insults the Philippine judiciary. He also conveniently forgot that his province mate and fellow lawyer Jude Sabio of Misamis Oriental withdrew the information he lodged against President Rodrigo Duterte before the ICC. The late Sabio manifested before the ICC that the complaint was politically motivated.
Sabio’s complaint alleged, among others, that Duterte organized the Davao Death Squad (DDS) which he claimed was behind the extrajudicial killings (EJK) in the country. That EJK was behind the thousands of victims in the government campaign against drug syndicates.
Both claims were nebulous in that DDS never existed as it was only a phantom force that was part of the psychological weapons used by the police authorities to counter the dreaded liquidation squads of the New Peoples’ Army at the height of the insurgency in Davao City in 1984.
The death toll which allegedly resulted from the drug war was among the information submitted to the ICC. It was ridiculously bloated and must have been based on the extrapolated figures contrived by Maria Ressa of Rappler.
And here lies the fallibility of the ICC prosecutors. Not only are they ignorant of the existence of judicial apparatus in countries they have the mindset of biases they swallow hook-line-and sinker what they read and heard from characters like Maria who does not wink an eyelash on western TV to declare that democracy is dead in the Philippines.
Their childish gullibility is perilous as demonstrated by their stoic stand to conduct a probe on extrajudicial killings and reports of human rights violations that were creatively storified by pan-handling human rights watch non -government organizations which European donor foundations recklessly fund. Add Maria Ressa’s narratives picturing the Philippines as worse than any country at war and you have a prosecutor panel hankering for the blood of human rights violators in my country.
If EJK and human rights violations are the issues, then they could have indicted several US Presidents who ordered carpet bombings in Iraq, Vietnam and Libya to name a few. But they will not because when it comes to the western power they have a different term for the victims of atrocities: “collateral damage.”
Senator Pimentel and his colleague in the feeble opposition, Riza Hontiveros, think our judiciary is flawed and we need the ICC to conduct investigations and trials in our land. Listen to Duterte. He will submit himself to trial only in a Philippine court. A trial by ICC indeed is a crazy man’s folly.