The 15-page warrant of arrest for former president Rodrigo Duterte issued by the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Pre-Trial Chamber 1 mentioned “co-perpetrators” and “direct perpetrators” in committing alleged crimes against humanity in the course of implementing his bloody war against illegal drugs.
This led lawyer Joel Butuyan, a counsel for drug war victims and one of five Filipinos accredited as counsels in the ICC, to believe that more warrants of arrest would be issued for other personalities involved in the ICC’s probe of the drug-related killings from Nov. 1, 2011 to March 16, 2019, when the Philippines was still a member of the Rome Statute.
“There are really indications that there would be other persons who are going to be arrested in addition to Mr. Duterte. For instance, paragraph 24, there is a phrase there which says, together with his co-perpetrators. So, there’s an indication that there’s going to be a forthcoming second or probably even third warrant of arrest.”
Source: VERA Files’ virtual interview with lawyer Joel Butuyan, March 11, 2025
“Besides,” he said, “Mr. Duterte is designated here as an indirect participant, so, we anticipate that there are going to be direct participants who are going to be charged as well.”
The chartered flight carrying Duterte left Manila at 11:03 p.m. on March 11 and was expected to land in Rotterdam, 21 kilometers from The Hague where the ICC is headquartered.
Paragraph 17 of the warrant, said that when Duterte first became mayor of Davao City in 1998, he established the “Lambada Boys,” which “acted as a death squad, composed of police officers and non-police hitmen, with a mission to kill criminals.” The “Lambada Boys” was later renamed as the Davao Death Squad, with Duterte as its founder and head.
A part of the warrant reads:
“Mr Duterte, jointly with high-ranking government officials and members of the police force (the ‘co- perpetrators’) and through other persons, agreed to ‘neutralise’ individuals they identified as alleged criminals or individuals with criminal propensities, including but not limited to drug offenders, initially in Davao and subsequently throughout the country.”
Source: ICC issues arrest warrant for Duterte, page 9
“The word ‘neutralise’ was used and understood by those involved in the operations to mean to ‘kill,” the warrant further stated.
“The Chamber finds reasonable grounds to believe that, in his role as the head of the DDS and subsequently the President of the Philippines, Mr Duterte used the direct perpetrators of the crimes as tools to commit the crimes,” it concluded.
Who may be Duterte’s direct or co-perpetrators? Who may be the subjects of the subsequent ICC arrest warrants?
In 2023, VERA Files reported that Vice President Sara Duterte and reelectionist Sens. Christopher Lawrence “Bong” Go and Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa were mentioned in documents submitted to the ICC.
(Read: VP Sara, 2 senators named in ICC probe documents)
Three former ranking PNP officers – Major General Romeo Caramat Jr., former chief of the CIDG; retired colonel Edilberto Leonardo, former commissioner of the National Police Commission; Brig. Gen. Eleazar Matta, former PNP chief intelligence officer – were included in the ICC investigation’s list of suspects, together with Dela Rosa and former PNP chief Oscar Albayalde, in a four-page confidential document dated July 3.
(Read: Can 3 high-ranking PNP officers get out of ICC suspects’ list?)
The document was sent through the Philippine Embassy in The Hague and released to the media on July 25 by former senator Antonio Trillanes IV, one of the earliest complainants to the ICC against Duterte’s brutal drug war.
The document said: “Under Article 54 (1) a of the Rome Statute, the [Office of the Prosecutor) is obliged to conduct investigations which cover all the facts and evidence. This includes providing individuals under suspicion of crimes to provide their version of the events.”
“In this context, the OTP has reasonable grounds to believe that the following retired and serving members of the Philippine National Police have committed crimes within the jurisdiction of the OTP.”
This was the first official ICC list of suspects ever reported on the investigation into alleged crimes against humanity committed under Duterte’s war on drugs, in which at least 20,000 persons were killed, according to human rights groups. The PNP, however, admits to only 6,000 individuals killed during police operations.