We are working with the leading critical legal journal Law & Critique to bring their brilliant output to a broader audience. Many of the papers published with Law & Critique will be accompanied by a shorter discussion on Critical Legal Thinking. In this case, please check out Salvador Regilme’s full article which is available open access on the Law & Critique site.

When Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila and eventually brought to The Hague in March 2025, the journey covered far more than geographical distance. A former head of government, who had spent years publicly celebrating expanded lethal violence, was forcibly submitted to an intergovernmental institution whose authority depends upon giving violence another name. Killings presented at home as policing could now enter the official legal record as crimes against humanity. Duterte’s government dehumanized poor, working-class Filipinos as disposable bodies; yet, the ICC proceedings can tranform the official record by recognizing people once reduced to disposable bodies as victims but also rights-bearing beings whose deaths demand legal and public scrutiny. 

Duterte’s detention in The Hague is significant, for several reasons. For one, the International Criminal Court has confirmed the charges against Duterte and committed him to trial, but the spectacle of a former president in The Hague can easily encourage an overly comforting story about international justice: the atrocities committed, the official responses of domestic and international institutions, the prosecution proceedings of the perpetrators, and the hope that the legal systems restore, or even transform, the moral order that the war on drugs’ politics systemically violated. 

Duterte’s war on drugs was made possible and reinforced through law, state security institutions, transnational security partnerships, political incentives, and deep socioeconomic hierarchies. The government under Duterte killed thousands of poor Filipinos under the guise of the war on drugs, while recoding poverty, drug use, and urban marginality as threats to the ruling class.Police operations, administrative routines, official policy rhetoric, prosecutorial weakness, legislative acquiescence, and judicial deference helped make extraordinary state violence under Duterte’s regime look ordinary. Duterte supplied the political language and official governmental authorization, although the machinery that made mass killing possible extended far beyond one man.

Impunity, viewed from this angle, acquires an institutional architecture because it is produced through relationships among states, elites, security agencies, legal systems, and geopolitical interests. The difficult question raised by Duterte’s prosecution therefore concerns the marco-social conditions that allowed his government’s violence to become governable, legitimate, and internationally tolerable for so long. The argument developed more fully in the accompanying Law & Critique article is that impunity must be understood both as the absence of punishment and accountability and the aggregate outcome of coopted institutions, international relationships, and unequal valuations of human life.

The international life of a domestic killing machine

Duterte perfected his politics in Davao City, where allegations of extrajudicial killing preceded his presidency by decades. Davao became a laboratory for a distinctive model of coercive governance. Violence generated fear; fear became evidence of discipline; discipline was marketed as effective government. Bodies left in public spaces communicated the political message with brutal economy.

This local order developed within a wider security environment. After 9/11, the Philippines emerged as a major US American counterterrorism partner in Southeast Asia. Mindanao, the island where Davao City is located, assumed particular strategic importance: US military aid, intelligence cooperation, training, and joint operations strengthened a domestic security apparatus in which the boundaries between terrorism, insurgency, criminality, and social disorder increasingly blurred, expanding the range of people and practices subjected to coercive state power.

While there is no direct causal link that connects US counterterrorism assistance to Duterte’s death squads during his time as Davao City’s mayor, the deeper link lies in the security environment it helped sustain, where coercive institutions gained resources and legitimacy while human rights concerns remained secondary to counterterrorism priorities. And this merging of punitive and militaristic approaches to governance refers to what I call authoritarian co-production: expanded state violence often appears domestically authored while depending upon international relationships that provide material capabilities, diplomatic indulgence, and the normative language that provides a veneer of political legitimacy. The concept directs attention to the wider relationships through which coercive rule acquires resources, protection, and international toleration. 

Sovereignty as political technology

Duterte repeatedly invoked Philippine sovereignty against international criticism, casting the ICC as foreign intrusion and human rights scrutiny as Western hypocrisy. Withdrawal from the Rome Statute gave this defiance institutional form, but his government depended upon foreign patronage that functions as his safety net for political survival. Military and intelligence cooperation with the United States while public alongside public support from China, despite repeated threats to terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement of the US and the Philippines. Duterte also courted Beijing for investment and diplomatic support as China largely avoided sustained criticism of the drug war.

Sovereignty thus became a flexible political instrument, as Duterte used anti-imperial rhetoric to deflect external accountability while preserving the security, diplomatic, and economic ties useful to his government. Geopolitical hedging allowed Manila to draw benefits from competing powers while framing international and domestic scrutiny as an affront to Filipino dignity. In this way, his government’s invocations of sovereignty functioned as a means for political insulation and leverage.  

What can The Hague actually do?

There are good reasons to distrust celebratory accounts of the ICC. For instance, the ICC’s interventions have fallen disproportionately on the Global South, while powerful states retain greater capacity to resist, delay, or limit international scrutiny. Palestine has made these inequalities especially difficult to ignore. When legal attention and accountability are unevenly distributed, international criminal law can reproduce and even reinforce the very hierarchies of human worth it claims to challenge.

Alternatively, I propose thinking about the ICC as a contested moral archive, whereby court filings, testimonies, forensic evidence, and legal analyses can preserve forms of suffering that perpetrator governments have denied, minimized, or recast as legitimate violence, even while the Court itself remains embedded in unequal structures of global governance.

This is relevant in the case of Duterte’s drug war that relied heavily on dehumanization: victims were classified as “drug personalities,” criminals, and threats to public order, categories that helped make their deaths appear acceptable while leaving their families with both grief and stigma. International criminal proceedings can disrupt that narrative. A state killing once presented as successful policing may enter the legal record as evidence of crimes against humanity, while a person reduced to an official category can reappear as someone whose death demands public explanation, legal accountability, and long-term socieconomic transformation. 

Yet, the limits are equally clear because a legal record or judgement in The Hague cannot compensate a family, reform the police, or undo the deep socioeconomic inequalities that made some communities far more exposed to lethal state power. The political value of the ICC, however, depends on what survivors, lawyers, activists, and public institutions can subsequently do with it.

From prosecution to radical accountability

The ICC proceedings against Duterte largely concern individual criminal responsibility, while the conditions that enabled the war on drugs extend further. Philippine constitutional democracy has long operated alongside severe economic inequality, dynastic politics, concentrated wealth, and uneven protection from state abuse. Formal constitutional guarantees of equality coexist with a social order in which poor communities face forms of coercive power from which wealthier citizens are far better insulated. Duterte’s drug war exploited these inequalities and intensified the dehumanization of people already living at the margins.

A meaningful reckoning therefore requires what I call radical accountability: attention to the institutions and political-economic conditions that made systematic violence possible. Some of that work is already underway as families of victims, priests, lawyers, journalists, human rights organizations, and survivor networks have preserved testimonies, recovered and reinterred remains, pursued cases, provided support to affected families, and created spaces of public remembrance. These practices show that accountability also develops beyond the formal legal proceedings in The Hague or in the courts in the Philippines. More importantly, such initiatives amplify the political voice of people whom Duterte’s war on drugs reduced to objects of state violence. The presentation of evidence and testimony  in courts can support material reparations and shape public memory, while legal findings can strengthen demands for long-term institutional reform and make future denial harder to sustain.

The real measure of justice must be found outside the courtrooms of The Hague: in whether poor families can encounter the police without fearing execution, courts investigate unlawful and unjust exercise of state power regardless of the victim’s socioeconomic standing, whether drug dependence is treated through public health and socioeconomic welfare interventions rather than militarized punishment, and whether survivors and victims can shape how the country remembers what happened.

Duterte’s presence in The Hague has already undermined one political fiction: that sovereignty can reliably shield state violence from judgment. But a more difficult problem remains: whereby prosecuting a former president does not destroy the unjust institutions, interests, inequalities, and necropolitical culture that made the Duterte regime’s violence possible. Nonetheless, The Hague can preserve evidence, name atrocity, and interrupt organized forgetting. That hope emerges when its institutional archive returns to the societies from which the violence came from and function as resources for memory, reparations claims, and long-term institutional change. That archive has to travel back home, and in so doing, that hope for justice is further reignited in the Philippines. 

This essay draws on Salvador Santino Regilme’s article, “The Hague as Archive: Duterte’s War on Drugs, Instrumental Sovereignty, and the Architecture of Global Impunity,” forthcoming in Law & Critique.

Salvador Santino Regilme is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute for History, Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research examines international human rights, global security, foreign aid, authoritarianism, and the political foundations of state violence.