Philippine police have arrested former President Rodrigo Duterte after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity over his deadly “war on drugs”.
The 79-year-old was taken into police custody shortly after his arrival at Manila airport from Hong Kong.
He has offered no apologies for his brutal anti-drugs crackdown, which saw thousands of people killed when he was president of the South East Asian nation from 2016 to 2022, and mayor of Davao city before that.
Upon his arrest, he questioned the basis for the warrant, asking: “What crime [have] I committed?”
Duterte’s former presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo criticised the arrest, calling it “unlawful” as the Philippines withdrew from the ICC in 2019.
The ICC earlier said that it has jurisdiction in the Philippines over alleged crimes committed before the country withdrew as a member.
But activists called the arrest a “historic moment” for those who perished in his drug war and their families, the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) said.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but today, it has bent towards justice. Duterte’s arrest is the beginning of accountability for the mass killings that defined his brutal rule,” said ICHRP chairman Peter Murphy.
Duterte had been in Hong Kong to campaign for the upcoming 12 May mid-term elections, where he had planned to run again for mayor of Davao.
Footage aired on local television showed him walking out of the airport using a cane. Authorities say he is in “good health” and is being cared for by government doctors.
“What is my sin? I did everything in my time for peace and a peaceful life for the Filipino people,” he told a cheering crowd of Filipino expatriates before leaving Hong Kong.
A video posted by his daughter, Veronica Duterte, showed Duterte in custody in a lounge at Manila’s Villamor Air Base. In it, he can be heard questioning the reason for his arrest.
“What is the law and what is the crime that I committed? I was brought here not of my own volition, it is somebody else’s. You have to answer now for the deprivation of liberty.”
Duterte’s arrest marks the “beginning of a new chapter in Philippine history”, said Filipino political scientist Richard Heydarian.
“This is about rule of law and human rights,” he said.
Heydarian added that authorities had arrested Duterte promptly at the airport instead of letting the matter take its course through the local courts to “avoid political chaos”.
“Duterte’s supporters were hoping they could go berserk in terms of public rallies and [use] all sorts of delaying tactics… [to] drag things on until the warrant of arrest loses momentum,” he said.
The demand for justice in Duterte’s drug war goes “hand in hand” with the political interests of his successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Heydarian said.
The Duterte and Marcos families formed a formidable alliance in the last elections in 2022, where against the elder Duterte’s wishes, his daughter Sara ran as Marcos Jr’s vice-president instead of seeking her father’s post.
The relationship unravelled publicly in recent months as the two families pursued separate political agendas.
Marcos initially refused to co-operate with the ICC investigation, but as his relationship with the Duterte family deteriorated, he changed his stance, and later indicated that the Philippines would co-operate.
It is not clear yet whether Marcos would go as far as extraditing the former president to stand trial in The Hague.
The ‘war on drugs’
Duterte served as mayor of Davao, a sprawling southern metropolis, for 22 years and has made it one of the country’s safest from street crimes.
He used the city’s peace-and-order reputation to cast himself as a tough-talking anti-establishment politician to win the 2016 elections by a landslide.
With fiery rhetoric, he rallied security forces to shoot drug suspects dead. More than 6,000 suspects were gunned down by police or unknown assailants during the campaign, but rights groups say the number could be higher.
A previous UN report found that most victims were young, poor urban males and that police, who do not need search or arrest warrants to conduct house raids, systematically forced suspects to make self-incriminating statements or risk facing lethal force.
Critics said the campaign targeted street-level pushers and failed to catch big-time drug lords. Many families also claimed that the victims – their sons, brothers or husbands – were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Investigations in parliament pointed to a shadowy “death squad” of bounty hunters targeting drug suspects. Duterte has denied the allegations of abuse.
“Do not question my policies because I offer no apologies, no excuses. I did what I had to do, and whether or not you believe it… I did it for my country,” Duterte told a parliament investigation in October.
“I hate drugs, make no mistake about it.”
The ICC first took note of the alleged abuses in 2016 and started its investigation in 2021. It covered cases from November 2011, when Duterte was mayor of Davao, to March 2019, before the Philippines withdrew from the ICC.
Since taking power, Marcos has scaled back Duterte’s anti-narcotics campaign and promised a less violent approach to the drug problem, but hundreds of drug-related killings have been recorded during his administration.
‘Donald Trump of the East’
Duterte remains widely popular in the Philippines as he is the country’s first leader from Mindanao, a region south of Manila, where many feel marginalised by the leaders in the capital.
He often speaks in Cebuano, the regional language, not Tagalog, which is more widely-spoken in Manila and northern regions.
When he stepped down in 2022, nearly nine in 10 Filipinos said they were satisfied with his performance as president – a score unseen among his predecessors since the restoration of democracy in 1986, according to the Social Weather Stations research institute.
His populist rhetoric and blunt statements earned him the moniker “Donald Trump of the East”. He has called Russian President Vladimir Putin his “idol” and under his administration, the Philippines’ pivoted their foreign policy to China away from the US, its long-standing ally.
Marcos restored Manila’s ties with Washington and criticised the Duterte government for being “Chinese lackeys” as the Philippines is locked in sea dispute with China.
China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that it was “closely monitoring the development of the situation” and warned the ICC against “politicisation” and “double standards” in the arrest of Duterte.
Duterte’s daughter and political heir, Sara Duterte, is tipped as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. The incumbent, Marcos, is barred by the constitution from seeking re-election.
