SolGen: Philippines has no legal duty to help ICC

Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra on Thursday stressed that the Philippine government had no legal duty to cooperate in the International Criminal Court's investigation of the Duterte administration’s war on drugs.

Guevarra thus remarked on reports that investigators of the ICC have arrived in the country.

“As far as the government is concerned, it has maintained its position that the state has no legal duty to cooperate with the ICC investigator,” Guevarra told reporters.

Guevarra said the ICC could investigate the drug war without coming to the Philippines.

“The ICC prosecutor can actually conduct his investigation without coming to the Philippines, as he has local groups providing him support and assistance,” he said.

“If ICC personnel had actually entered the country, the BI would have the necessary information,” he added.

The Bureau of Immigration could not say whether ICC personalities had entered the Philippines.

“We are unable to give a comment as we have no official information yet about this matter,” BI spokesperson Dana Sandoval told GMA News Online.

For his part, Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla previously said that members of the ICC must make contact with the government if they are already in the country.

“If a multilateral agency or a body like the ICC wants to step into a country, it has to make contact with authorities in the country. And they have not done that. So whatever is happening is not the formal— if there’s something happening, it’s not the formal thing,” Remulla said in a media briefing last week.

Pressed whether the ICC may enter the country informally, Remulla reiterated that protocol must be established if their investigation will be used legally.

“Well, when you’re writing a book, I will not ask you about why you are writing that book. For me, that is just research. Research is that research. But for it to be used in a legal process, in a compulsory process, for authorities to be called to action to arrest people where rights are already involved, then we cannot do that,” he said.

Earlier, Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa said President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. assured that ICC investigators would enter the country.

The Philippines, under then-President Rodrigo Duterte, withdrew from the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, in 2019 after the tribunal began a probe into the drug war, followed by a formal inquiry in September 2021.

In January 2023, the ICC authorized the reopening of the inquiry after it was suspended in November 2021.

The ICC Appeals Chamber in July 2023 also denied the government’s against the resumption of the inquiry, prompting numerous government officials, including Marcos and Guevarra, to speak against continued engagement with the ICC.

In November, however, Marcos said that returning into the fold of the international tribunal is “under study” even though he maintained that there are “problems” on the issue of jurisdiction.

Under the drug war, at least 6,200 suspects were killed in police operations based on government records. Human rights groups, however, claimed the actual death toll could be from 12,000 to 30,000. — NB/VBL, GMA Integrated News