The charges against former president Rodrigo Duterte submitted by the prosecution in July 2025 and confirmed in April 2026 remain without changes as the Trial Chamber III of the International Criminal Court rejected the motion of the defense counsel to refile them.
In a summation of the submissions on the defense’s first motion, Presiding Judge Joanna Korner, said, “The Defense requests the Chamber to ‘order the Prosecution to re-file a document before the Pre-Trial Chamber that frames the charges in terms of counts with a defined scope, being crimes under the ICC Statute, and with an exhaustive list of underpinning acts which represent the entirety of the charges against the accused’ pursuant to Article 61(9) of the Statute.”
The chamber “rejects the defense’s first motion,” the decision stated.
Refiling tantamount to relitigating
It will be recalled that in July 2025 the prosecution filed with the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber documents containing charges and its list of evidence to support its charge of crimes against humanity under the following parameters: Count 1 encompasses the killings when he was Davao City mayor, count 2 covers the killing of high-value targets when he was president, and Count 3 includes killings in barangay-level operations or known as Oplan Tokhang.
Peter Haynes, who took on the defense of Duterte last May, complained that the way the charges are currently framed violates his client’s “right to be informed in detail of the nature, cause and content of the charges.”
He further asserted that the charges are ‘a moving target’ and expressed concerns that the ‘current landscape of crimes in this case’ is ‘virtually unlimited’. As a result, he said Duterte “has no notice of what he will face at trial” which starts on Nov. 30.
The Common Legal Representatives of Victims opposed the defense’s motion saying it “constitutes an impermissible attempt to relitigate the Confirmation Decision.”
In rejecting Haynes’ motion, the chamber pointed out that the charges “provide the Accused with sufficient notice to enable the Accused to prepare his defense.”
As to the defense’s allegation that the charges are “a moving target,” Korner said Haynes ignored the procedural safeguards the chamber has taken on the matter.
Second motion on eight additional incidents
On the defense’s second motion, the chamber accepted the prosecution’s proposed inclusion of additional incidents, which, it said, are illustrative of the charged crimes. It, however, ordered the prosecution to remove Incident 57 in its trial brief and update the witnesses list by October.
The chamber noted that the witnesses related to the new incidents are not expected to be called during the first months of trial. It gave the assurance that “no witness relating to the additional incidents is called to give evidence before the Defense has had reasonable time to prepare.”
