The International Criminal Court Trial Chamber III has rejected the defense’s motion to require expert reports for digital evidence submitted by prosecutors in the case against former president Rodrigo Duterte, saying the requirement could cause “needless delay” to the start of the trial.
The defense had sought to amend the E-Court Protocol to add an expert verification field for open-source and user-generated evidence, arguing this would help ensure that only verified material is submitted amid the prosecution’s large volume of evidence.
In its Sept. 28 decision, the chamber said the proposed amendment would go beyond simply adding a metadata field. It would effectively require expert reports to accompany all digital evidence submitted to the chamber.
“Given the large volume of evidence that has been made available by the prosecution in the present case, as well as the breadth of open source and user-generated evidence,” the chamber said, the requirement could prove unnecessary and “could well have the effect of causing a needless delay to the start of the trial,” part of the ruling said.
The judges also said the defense proposal was inconsistent with the chamber’s Directions on the Conduct of Proceedings.
Under those directions, the defense first identifies issues with specific evidence, after which the prosecution determines whether supporting material, such as an expert verification report, is necessary.
The defense proposal would reverse that process by requiring the prosecution to provide supporting material before the defense could raise questions about the evidence.
“Such amendment would not align with the framework as clarified in paragraph 13 of the present decision,” the chamber said.
The prosecution had earlier opposed a blanket requirement for expert verification reports, arguing that these should be required only when necessary and should not automatically apply to material from reputable sources such as government websites, news organizations and human rights groups.
URL field approved
The chamber, however, granted the prosecution’s request to add a uniform resource locator, or URL, metadata field to the E-Court Protocol.
The field will allow the court and the parties to identify where open-source evidence was located online when it was captured.
The chamber directed the ICC Registry to file the amended E-Court Protocol by Oct. 2, less than two months before Duterte’s trial on crimes against humanity charges is scheduled to begin on Nov. 30.
