The following is an editorial opinion piece by the Breaking News Negros Oriental Editorial Board, published June 2026. Opinion pieces represent the views of the editorial board and are labeled as such in accordance with standard newsroom practice.
When Justice Moves at a Sprint for Rivals and Stands Still for Guests
When Philippine authorities arrested former president Rodrigo Duterte at the Manila airport on the morning of March 11, 2025, and put him on a private jet bound for The Hague before midnight that same day, the official narrative was triumphant. This, we were told, was a victory for the rule of law and for international cooperation — proof that no one, not even a former head of state, stands above accountability.
The speed alone was jaw-dropping. In a country whose justice system is a byword for delay, where ordinary cases crawl through the courts for a decade or more, a former president was seized and surrendered to a foreign tribunal in roughly fourteen hours. He was gone before his own Supreme Court could rule on the petition his lawyers had rushed to file.
It happened despite a basic and inconvenient fact: the Philippines is no longer a member of the International Criminal Court. It withdrew from the Rome Statute in 2019, on Mr. Duterte's own order.
There are sound legal arguments for that surrender. The ICC retains jurisdiction over crimes allegedly committed while the Philippines was still a member, and Republic Act 9851 provides a domestic basis for cooperation. The drug war that Mr. Duterte presided over left thousands dead — official tallies count at least 6,000 in police operations, while human-rights monitors put the toll many times higher. A reckoning is overdue. We do not mourn the principle that a former president can be made to answer for mass killing.
What we question is not the arrest. It is the conviction behind it.
The Handshake in Kazan: Marcos Co-Chairs Summit Beside ICC-Wanted Putin
Fast-forward to June 2026. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. traveled to Kazan, Russia, where — in his capacity as ASEAN chair — he did not merely attend the ASEAN–Russia Commemorative Summit. He co-chaired it, standing beside Vladimir Putin, clasping his hand for the cameras, and praising a partnership built, in his words, on "mutual respect" and the conviction that "cooperation, not confrontation, is the surest path to peace." The summit closed with the Kazan Declaration and a five-year plan to deepen ties.
Mr. Putin is a wanted man. On March 17, 2023, the same International Criminal Court that now holds Mr. Duterte issued a warrant for the Russian president's arrest. The charge is the war crime of unlawfully deporting and transferring children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia. It was the first ICC warrant ever issued against the leader of a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The Court's 125 member states are obliged to detain him should he set foot on their soil.
Russia, like the Philippines, rejects the Court's jurisdiction. The crucial difference is what each government then chose to do.
Manila handed over its own former president in a single day. It is now pursuing a sitting senator, Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa — Mr. Duterte's former police chief and co-accused — whose ICC warrant was unsealed in May 2026 and whose plea to block his arrest the Supreme Court rejected. And yet the same administration, presented with the ICC's single most prominent fugitive, extended a hand and an embrace.
One Standard for Enemies, Another for Allies
A nation genuinely convinced of its principles has tools short of complicity. It can decline to co-chair. It can send a lower-ranking delegate. It can register, plainly, that it will not lend the dignity of its head of state to a leader its own chosen court has branded a war-crimes suspect.
The Philippines has done as much before. During the apartheid era, it joined the international boycott of South Africa and restricted its citizens from traveling there, because some forms of repression were judged unworthy of normal relations.
No such scruple appeared in Kazan. Diplomacy carries real and legitimate stakes — trade, energy, food security, the careful management of a multipolar world — and reasonable people can argue that engagement serves the national interest better than isolation. But a government cannot invoke the sanctity of international justice to justify surrendering its rivals and then set that same justice aside the moment it becomes diplomatically expensive.
Either the ICC's warrants command respect or they do not. Principle is not a switch to be flipped by the guest list.
The Dela Rosa Warrant and the Narrowing Circle
The unsealing of Senator dela Rosa's ICC warrant in May 2026 added another layer to the administration's posture on international accountability. The Supreme Court's rejection of his bid to block his arrest signaled that Manila's cooperation with the Court — at least where the Duterte political network is concerned — remains active and deliberate.
Taken together, the Duterte transfer in March 2025 and the movement against dela Rosa in 2026 form a clear pattern: the current administration has chosen, at significant political and legal risk, to engage with ICC processes when the targets are drawn from the opposing political camp ahead of the 2028 national elections.
That context does not automatically render the ICC cooperation illegitimate. The drug war killings are documented, the Court's jurisdiction over the relevant period is legally defensible, and accountability for mass atrocity is not diminished by the political convenience it may also bring. But context matters when evaluating a government's stated commitment to the rule of law as a universal principle rather than a tactical instrument.
The Pattern That the Kazan Visit Makes Impossible to Ignore
This is the Putin Dance. Arrest your political opponents in the name of the rule of law; then stand beside the rule of law's most wanted when it suits your diplomatic calendar. The pattern invites an uncomfortable question that the administration has not answered: Is this about justice, or about the selective use of an international court to dismantle a domestic rival — the Duterte political camp — before the 2028 election?
We would be glad to be wrong. The way to prove it is consistency.
A government that means what it says about accountability does not get to choose which warrants are sacred and which are merely awkward. It does not get to frame the Duterte surrender as a watershed moment for Philippine adherence to international norms and then co-chair a summit with the man who holds the ICC's most prominent active warrant.
The Marcos administration has the legal architecture, the rhetorical vocabulary, and — when it chose to use it against Mr. Duterte — the operational capacity to act on international accountability demands with remarkable speed and resolve. None of that capacity was anywhere in evidence in Kazan.
What Genuine Commitment to Accountability Would Require
Consistency does not demand that the Philippines place itself at the center of every geopolitical confrontation. It does not require Manila to lecture Moscow or position itself as an enforcement arm of the international legal order. The country has genuine interests in its relationships with Russia — agricultural trade, energy diplomacy, the delicate balancing act of a middle power in a fractured multipolar environment.
But there is a wide and navigable distance between pragmatic engagement and co-chairing a summit with a man the ICC has charged with war crimes. Other ASEAN member states navigated that distance. Manila, as chair, chose not to.
A government serious about international accountability can engage with Russia through its foreign ministry. It can send its trade representatives, its agriculture attachés, its energy negotiators. It can pursue cooperation on the terms that serve its people without placing the presidential imprimatur on a wanted man's international rehabilitation.
That choice was available. It was not taken. And until Manila applies one standard to friend and foe alike — until the same urgency that put Mr. Duterte on a plane to The Hague in fourteen hours is matched by even a diplomatic footnote when the guest of honor carries an ICC warrant — the handshake in Kazan will stand as what it appears to be: not a principle, but a pose.
This editorial was produced by the Breaking News Negros Oriental Editorial Board. Editorial opinions are clearly labeled and do not constitute reporting. All facts cited are drawn from the public record.
Photo credit: Photo from Breaking News Negros Oriental Editorial Board