THE lead defense counsel of former president Rodrigo Duterte has slammed the Marcos administration for surrendering him to the International Criminal Court (ICC) instead of holding a trial in Manila.
The 80-year old Duterte is detained in the Hague where he is facing crimes against humanity charges before the ICC in connection with the bloody anti-drug crackdown during his administration.
Lawyer Nicholas Kaufman made the remark to a group of vloggers and Filipino journalists outside the detention facility in the Hague where Duterte is detained.
A clip of the exchange was posted Wednesday night by former Malacañang spokesperson and Duterte ally Harry Roque on his social media account.
“I certainly hope he’ll be back in the Philippines before the confirmation hearing. In fact, I can’t understand why he’s here at all,” Kaufman said.
“He’s a Filipino citizen. There’s a Filipino president in that country who threw a Filipino citizen over here to be tried. Why isn’t he in the Philippines? Why isn’t he being tried in the Philippines? Why is there not a Filipino judge who is trying him?” he added.
Duterte faced the judges of the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber three days after he was arrested in Manila on March 11 and flown on the same day to the Hague.
He will appear next during the confirmation hearing of the charges against him on September 23 this year.
The Marcos administration has earned criticism from Duterte supporters, including several senators, for his arrest and surrender to the ICC despite Manila’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute that created the international tribunal in 2019.
Malacañang has defended its move, saying the country complied with its commitment to the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) to arrest and hand over Duterte based on an ICC warrant.
In the same interview, Kaufman also said they will ask for Duterte’s interim release from detention, but he declined to provide the exact date of the filing.
“There will be a request for interim release in due course. But as I said many times before, certain conditions have to be ripe for that interim release to take place, “ he said.
A check with ICC data showed no accused charged with genocide or crimes against humanity have been granted interim release by the court.
Under Article 58 of the Rome Statute, the ICC will consider several factors in its decision to grant an accused interim release, including the accused’s voluntary appearance during the trial of the case, the risk of obstruction to the investigation, and the possibility of continuing his alleged crimes.
If Duterte is granted interim release, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber 1, aside from imposing conditions, may also conduct annual case reviews, and, if necessary, reissue an arrest warrant.
‘LYING’
In the same interview, Kaufman alleged Filipino lawyers Joel Butuyan and Kristina Conti “lied” to the media about the alleged move of the defense to limit the participation of drug war victims in the ongoing ICC proceedings
“This whole thing about the judges rejecting my proposal, that never happened. All that happened was that there were two activist victims’ representatives by the names of Joel Butuyan and Kristina Conti who made all sorts of assertions in the press that I had asked to restrict victims’ participation in the process by limiting the ID documents that could be used,” Kaufman said.
“That never happened,” he added, explaining that the defense team merely submitted its observations to the ICC’s Victims Participation and Reparations Section and suggested that identity documents for alleged drug war victims should follow standards similar to the Philippine Social Security System, such as a national ID or passport, for easier verification and so as not to cause delay in the proceedings of the case.
“We didn’t make a request which was rejected by the court. That’s a big lie,” Kaufman said.
In a document submitted to the ICC dated April 7, Duterte’s legal team urged the Court to come up with strict standards for verifying the identities of victims in relation to the crimes against humanity cases he is facing before the international tribunal.
Kaufman then told the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber that there should be a limitation to the types of identification documents it should accept from the victims who will participate in the case against the former president to reduce the risk of fraud and potential delays in the trial of the case.
He said the Court should require a national identity card and/or a passport containing an up-to-date photograph, and in the absence of these, the Pre-Trial Chamber should require identification documents “accepted in the staggered fashion mandated by the social security system of the Republic of the Philippines.”
Aside from possible fraud and delays in the case, Kaufman said the use of varied and insufficiently vetted or verified identification documents could lead to the “inclusion of false victims, misidentification and double counting of victims.”
The move was criticized by Butuyan and Conti, with the former accusing Kaufman of being ignorant of the realities facing many of the drug war victims.
Butuyan said the kind of IDs being demanded by Kaufman are documents that are badges of wealth and privilege in the Philippines and ones that are mostly unavailable to poor victims, and who constitute the overwhelming number of the people killed in Duterte’s drug war.
