Duterte’s defense has only just begun—and it is not merely a bold move, but an entirely appropriate one, given the fundamentally political nature of the proceedings against him. What is unfolding before the International Criminal Court (ICC) is, in essence, a show trial.
It is a show trial because Duterte is not there to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, as would be expected in any genuine criminal proceeding. Instead, his guilt has already been predetermined—shaped and cemented by a massive global propaganda campaign. The ICC’s role, then, is reduced to little more than going through the motions, performing formalities to dress up a verdict that was decided long before the trial began. In this skewed setup, the burden of proof is effectively shifted onto the accused: Duterte must prove his innocence, precisely because that is what the logic of a show trial demands.
Duterte, who possesses a keen understanding of how the international system operates, is well aware of this dynamic. He recognizes that this is not a criminal trial in the traditional sense, but a political one. And political trials do not conclude when the judge’s gavel falls. They transcend the present, outliving the passions and prejudices of their time. Their final verdict is reserved for a future generation—one that may look back on these events without the fog of contemporary propaganda, and judge for itself what truly transpired.
To navigate this political trial, Duterte has two strategic paths available: the path of connivance and the path of rupture. This framework, masterfully articulated by the renowned French lawyer Jacques Vergès in De la Stratégie Judiciaire, provides the key to understanding the defense’s approach.
The path of connivance is one of implicit acceptance. The accused, by engaging with the court on its own terms, acknowledges its authority. The defense is confined to contesting facts or the application of the law, but never the legitimacy of the court itself. As Vergès explains, if the accused accepts the court’s legitimacy, “the trial is possible, consisting of a dialogue between the accused who explains himself and the judge whose values are accepted.” It is a trial conducted within the system.
The alternative is the path of rupture. This is a fundamental rejection of the court’s authority to sit in judgment. The accused does not seek to win an argument within the system, but to break the system itself. Vergès describes this dynamic with precision: if the accused refuses the court’s legitimacy, “the judicial apparatus falls apart; it is a trial that refuses the legitimacy of authority, one of total rupture.”
Duterte has chosen, unequivocally, the path of rupture. Rather than conniving with the court, he has turned the accusing finger back onto the ICC, putting its very legitimacy on trial. From the outset, he has maintained that the ICC has no jurisdiction over his person. This stance was crystallized in his letter to the Court on 17 February 2026, in which he waived his right to appear at the confirmation of charges hearing. “I do not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over my person,” he declared. He then proceeded to lay out the political context of his rendition to The Hague, stating plainly: “My kidnapping was facilitated by the office of the incumbent President.”
He concluded the letter with a message that most powerfully encapsulates his strategy of rupture: “I wish for this Court to respect my peace inside the cell it has placed me. I have accepted the fact that I could die in prison.”
On its surface, this is a personal statement of resignation. But in the context of a political trial—and of rupture as a judicial strategy—it is something far more profound. It is the final word of an accused who has rejected the court’s power to grant or deny him anything, including freedom. By stating that he has found peace within the cell, and that he has accepted the possibility of dying there, Duterte does something remarkable: he renders the court’s ultimate power—the power to punish—irrelevant. A guilty verdict, a life sentence, even death itself, cannot touch a man who has already declared his peace and acceptance.
This is the deepest logic of strategy of rupture. It does not seek acquittal. It does not beg for mercy. It denies the court the moral authority to define the accused’s fate. In doing so, Duterte places himself beyond the reach of the ICC’s judgment. His peace is not something the court can grant or revoke; it is something he has claimed for himself, within the very walls the court has placed him. The message to history is clear: whatever verdict the ICC delivers, it will be delivered against a man who has already pronounced his own. The final word, he insists, will not belong to The Hague.
This is precisely the dynamic that international legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi captured in his essay, “Between Impunity and Show Trials.” He articulated the central paradox that haunts all such proceedings:
This is the paradox: to convey an unambiguous historical 'truth' to its audience, the trial will have to silence the accused. But in such case, it ends up as a show trial. In order for the trial to be legitimate, the accused must be entitled to speak. But in that case, he will be able to challenge the version of truth represented by the prosecutor and relativise the guilt that is thrust upon him by the powers on whose strength the Tribunal stands. His will be the truth of the revolution and he himself a martyr for the revolutionary cause.
The ICC, in its pursuit of a definitive historical verdict on the war on drugs, finds itself ensnared in this very contradiction. Its claim to legitimacy rests on granting the accused a voice. Yet, by allowing Duterte to speak—through his letter, through his chosen silence, through his very presence—it has opened the door for him to challenge the very “truth” the prosecution seeks to establish. He is not merely contesting facts; he is relativising the guilt thrust upon him by the political powers that animate the Court. He is offering a counter-narrative: that his “kidnapping” was a political act facilitated by his successor, that the proceedings are a farce, and that he is a man who has made his peace not with the court, but with himself.
In doing so, Duterte has seized upon the very condition that the ICC requires for its own legitimacy—his right to speak—and weaponized it. He has transformed the courtroom, or his deliberate absence from it, into a stage for his own truth. And what is that truth? It is the truth of the accused who refuses to be defined by his accusers. It is, in Koskenniemi’s framework, the truth of the “revolutionary”—not in the ideological sense, but in the structural sense: the one who rejects the foundational authority of the tribunal itself.
By accepting the possibility of dying in an ICC cell, Duterte completes this transformation. He ceases to be a defendant seeking justice from the court and becomes, in the eyes of his followers and for the historical record he is a martyr. He is a martyr not for a policy, but for the cause of sovereignty itself, for the principle that a leader’s fate should be decided by his people, not by a distant court backed by global power. The court, in its attempt to avoid being a show trial by giving him a voice, has allowed him to stage a counter-trial. And the final verdict in that counter-trial will not be delivered by the judges in The Hague. It will be rendered by a future generation, looking back at a man who, when placed before the bar of international opinion, refused to plead, refused to recognize the court, and declared his peace from within its own prison walls. In that act of total rupture, he has ensured that his story will outlive the court’s judgment.
Duterte understands, perhaps better than his accusers, that political trials are not settled by the gavel. They are not won or lost in the chamber of the ICC, but in the wider court of history. The guilty verdict that the world’s media has already prepared for him, the propaganda that has painted him as a criminal before any evidence was heard—these belong to the present, to its passions, its prejudices, its convenient narratives. But the present does not have the final word.
The final word belongs to the future.
Future generations will not weigh Duterte according to the passions of his detractors, nor will they measure him by the headlines that sought to condemn him. They will weigh him using the scale of history—a scale that judges according to context, according to proportion, and according to the stark choices that leaders in the Global South often face, between the abstract dictates of international bodies and the concrete demands of their societies. They will weigh him according to whether he acted in what he perceived to be the interest of his people, and whether his methods, however harsh, were a response to a crisis that those sitting in comfortable courtrooms in The Hague never had to confront.
The scale of history judges according to the depth of truth—not the shallow, foreordained “truth” of a show trial, but the messy, contested, and human truth that emerges only when all voices, including the voice of the accused, have been heard and weighed without prejudice.
Duterte has ensured that his voice will be among those heard. By choosing rupture, by rejecting the court’s legitimacy, by declaring his peace from within its prison, he has not evaded judgment. He has simply insisted that the only judgment that matters is yet to come. The ICC may deliver its verdict in its own time. But history, which moves more slowly and sees more clearly, will deliver its own. And when it does, it will not ask whether Duterte followed the procedures of international law.
Duterte’s political enemies thought they ended him by throwing him into a foreign prison, but they merely transplanted him onto a larger stage. They sought to silence him, yet his words now echo beyond the walls of his cell. They intended The Hague to be his tomb, but history may remember it as his pulpit. In their haste to convict him, they handed him exactly what every political leader secretly hopes for but rarely receives: a voice that carries across generations, and a story that will outlive his accusers and the connivers banished him to The Hague.
When passions and prejudices have subsided, when the headlines have faded and the advocates have fallen silent, what will remain is not the noise of the present but the sobriety of the future sifting through the evidence not with the urgency of those who sought a conviction, but with the patience of those who seek only to understand. And in that long, slow judgment, Duterte may yet be seen not as the monster his accusers painted, nor as the saviour his followers proclaimed, but as something far more human: a father.
A father of the nation who, like every father, was not perfect—who made mistakes, who carried burdens invisible to those who never held his office, who walked paths that others judged from a distance but never trod themselves. Like every father, he believed he was protecting his children, even when the world told him his protection was too fierce, too flawed, too human. The future will understand what the present refuses to see: that nations, like families, are not raised by saints but by flawed men and women who do what they must with what they have. And when that future looks back, it will ask not whether Duterte was without sin—for no father is—but whether he loved his country in his own way, and whether that love, however imperfect, was meaningful.
The ICC cannot answer this because meaning is not found in statutes or verdicts, but in the silent arithmetic of a nation’s memory—the sum of lives touched, of order kept, of chaos held at bay by hands that history will never fully cleanse nor fully condemn but will simply fully weigh—adding his name to the ledger of leaders who walked the edge of darkness so their people might walk in light, who bore the scars of choices that comfortable men in quiet rooms will never have to make, and whose final accounting belongs not to any court, but to the soil that first shaped them and the nation that will, long after the verdicts fade, decide for itself what his rule truly meant.
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