The Hague has not invaded Philippine democracy. It has exposed it. Unless you follow Filipino politics closely, the latest chapter in the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s Philippines investigation may look like another legal argument about jurisdiction. It is not. It is a stress test of the republic.
On 11 May, 2026 the ICC unsealed an arrest warrant for Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, Rodrigo Duterte’s former police chief and public face of the former president’s “war on drugs”. The warrant had reportedly been issued secretly in November 2025. The Court says there are reasonable grounds to believe Dela Rosa committed murder as a crime against humanity, linked to 32 killings between 2016 and 2018.
That alone would have been significant. Dela Rosa is not some retired functionary hiding in a suburb. He is a sitting senator, a former national police chief, and one of the men who turned Duterte’s campaign rhetoric into police practice. He was the grinning mascot of Tokhang, the operational code name for Duterte’s deadly ‘war on drugs’. If Duterte was the author, Bato was one of the implementers.
But what happened next was the real story.
Dela Rosa, absent from public view for months, suddenly appeared on May 11 in the Senate to help oust Senate President Tito Sotto and install Alan Peter Cayetano, a Duterte ally, in his place. This was happening as the House of Representatives moved on the second impeachment of Vice-President Sara Duterte. The Senate was not merely changing leadership. It was being rearranged for two battles at once: the ICC case against Bato, and the impeachment trial of Sara Duterte.
Gunshots inside the Senate
Then came the farce. CCTV showed Dela Rosa being chased by National Bureau of Investigation agents through the Senate. He was placed under “protective custody” by the chamber he had just helped tilt toward Duterte loyalists. Barbed wire went up. Riot police gathered. Senators talked solemnly about rules and sovereignty while a man accused of crimes against humanity hid behind parliamentary privilege like a child under a table.
By Wednesday night, the farce had become darker. Gunshots were reported inside the Senate. By Thursday, Dela Rosa was gone. Reuters reported that Cayetano read a message from Dela Rosa’s wife referring to his “escape”, while his whereabouts remained unclear and the government could not say who fired shots or who exactly entered the Senate compound. Reuters also reported that investigators were considering whether the chaos was staged. If true, that would move the episode from obstruction into something even more sinister.
This is the latest answer to the question I asked in Justice Info after Duterte’s arrest: what will the Philippines get from the ICC? The answer, so far, is not justice. It is exposure. The ICC has forced the political class to show itself.
“What process did our families receive?”
For years, Duterte’s defenders claimed the drug war was lawful, popular, necessary. They said the dead were criminals, that police only killed in self-defence, that international critics did not understand Philippine realities. Fine. Then face the evidence. Go to court. Argue it. Defend it in daylight.
Instead, the chief enforcer ran.
That image matters. A senator sprinting through corridors to avoid accountability says more than any legal brief. The men who once promised order now produce disorder. The men who told the poor to submit to police power now plead for due process. The men who dismissed the dead as collateral damage now discover human rights when the handcuffs come for them.
Families of drug war victims noticed the hypocrisy immediately. One mother told Reuters that the powerful are protected even when accused, while the poor were simply killed. “What process did our families receive?” she asked. That is the moral centre of this whole case. The ICC is not an abstraction to those families. It is the only institution that has treated their dead as human beings rather than police statistics.
This is why the “foreign intrusion” argument is so dishonest. The Hague did not invent the corpses. It did not invent the mothers, widows and children who have carried this case for years. It did not invent the Philippine Supreme Court’s own recognition that withdrawal from the Rome Statute does not magically erase obligations incurred while the Philippines was a member. As Rights Report Philippines has explained, the legal position is far less mysterious than senators pretend: the Philippines has domestic and international-law tools to arrest and surrender Dela Rosa, if it chooses to use them.
What the ICC has intruded upon is not sovereignty. It has intruded upon impunity.
That is why the reaction has been so frantic. Duterte is already in The Hague. Dela Rosa is wanted. Duterte’s former special assistant and now senator Bong Go and others have been named as alleged co-perpetrators in ICC filings. Sara Duterte has been impeached again.
The ICC has not purified the system
So yes, the ICC has changed Philippine democracy, but not in the simple way its supporters might hope.
It has not purified the system. It has not made the courts suddenly brave, the police suddenly honest, or Congress suddenly principled. It has not ended dynastic politics. It has not given victims full justice. Duterte’s trial will still be slow. Dela Rosa may yet dodge arrest for some time. The Senate may still turn Sara Duterte’s impeachment into another elite bargaining session.
But the ICC has changed the terrain. It has made impunity costly. It has forced every institution to choose a side in public. The Senate could have stood for law. Instead, it offered shelter. Incumbent President Ferdinand Marcos Jr could have made a clean argument for cooperation. Instead, he still performs the old dance: deny cooperation, allow pieces of it, then deny responsibility for the consequences. Duterte loyalists could have argued innocence. Instead, they barricaded themselves behind procedure.
For ordinary Filipinos, even those not following every ICC document, this lands differently. Many will not read the warrant. They will see the clip. They will understand the symbolism. A poor man suspected of drugs did not get protective custody. He got a bullet. A senator accused over the machinery that killed him got colleagues, lawyers, livestreams, petitions, and a locked-down legislature.
Impunity losing its police escort
That is the democratic wound the ICC has reopened. Not because The Hague is perfect. It is not. The Court is slow, selective, vulnerable to geopolitics, and often distant from the people in whose name it acts. I have argued before that the ICC must make Duterte’s trial useful to Filipinos, or risk becoming another remote performance for international lawyers. That remains true.
But last week showed something else. Sometimes the value of international justice is not only in the eventual verdict. Sometimes it is in the panic it induces among the untouchables. Bato running through the Senate was not justice. But it was something. It was the sound of impunity losing its police escort.
The Philippines now faces a choice. It can treat the ICC as a foreign insult and allow fugitives to turn the Senate into a safe house. Or it can use this moment to rebuild domestic accountability: arrest those wanted, protect witnesses, prosecute lower-level perpetrators, and finally tell victims that the law belongs to them too.
The Hague has entered Philippine politics because Philippine justice failed to do its job. The way to get The Hague out is not to hide Bato in the Senate. It is to make Philippine democracy worthy of the name.
Dr Tom Smith is the Academic Director of the Royal Air Force College and an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He focuses on conflict and human rights in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. He has been a vocal critic of the Duterte regime and advised human rights groups in the region, working with civil society, UK government and overseas governments and NGOs.
