Thirty Thousand Deserve More Than a Debate About Jurisdiction

The Philippines is once again arguing in the wrong courtroom.

Not The Hague—that part is finally right. The argument I mean is the one happening on television, in senatorial halls, in social media threads across the country: ICC versus sovereignty. International justice versus domestic dignity. Foreign meddling versus homegrown impunity. Pick your side.

Let me be direct: both sides have legitimate points. And both sides are missing the point entirely.

What Both Sides Get Right

The case for the ICC is solid. The Philippine justice system was never going to prosecute Rodrigo Duterte—not while allies held the Senate, not while the same police force that carried out the killings remained largely intact, not while victims’ families faced the very real risk of silencing. The ICC, insulated from these pressures, can do what our institutions chose not to: build a record, hear testimony in safety, examine the systematic nature of what happened. And when a former head of state faces international accountability, it signals to every future leader that impunity has a ceiling.

The sovereignty critique is also serious—not as Duterte’s camp deploys it, but at its core. There is something genuinely uncomfortable about the fact that it took a court in the Netherlands to do what Manila refused to do. The ICC has no enforcement mechanism of its own. Without government cooperation, its warrants are paper. International trials are notoriously slow, and Duterte is 79 and reportedly in poor health. And here is the deepest concern: does handing this to The Hague allow Philippine institutions to avoid the reckoning they desperately need?

That concern is right. But the conclusion most draw from it—that this makes the ICC the wrong path—is not.

The Mechanism People Miss

The ICC trial, even with all its limitations, does one thing no Philippine court has done: it builds a permanent record.

Every testimony, every document, every victim statement entered at The Hague cannot be shredded by a sympathetic archivist or sealed by a friendly judge. It is truth written where no one in Malacañang can reach it. This matters not just as legal process but as moral acknowledgment—a formal, international refusal to allow the erasure of thirty thousand lives.

And here’s what the sovereignty camp misses: that record is leverage. The Marcos administration’s discomfort with ICC involvement is not incidental—it is diplomatic and reputational cost. Every proceeding that continues, every testimony that enters the record, raises the price of impunity for any Philippine government. This is not leverage for foreign powers. It is leverage for Filipino civil society, journalists, and advocates to demand more from their own institutions.

The ICC trial is not the destination. It is a catalyst—a pressure point that can force what no domestic political arrangement has yet managed: making it genuinely costly for the Philippine state to do nothing.

What the Thirty Thousand Actually Need

The debate we’re having treats justice as a legal event—a verdict, a conviction, a punishment. But the families of thirty thousand dead do not primarily need a verdict. They need three things: truth, dignity, and the credible promise of non-repetition.

Truth: acknowledgment that something wrong happened, and that it was not their loved ones’ fault. Dignity: recognition that those killed were human beings, not collateral in a war on crime. Non-repetition: meaningful reform of the institutions that killed them.

Here is the hard reality. The ICC, on its own, can deliver truth—partially, painfully slowly, but it can deliver it. It cannot deliver non-repetition. The machine that killed thirty thousand people is still running. The command culture that made summary execution acceptable remains intact. A verdict in the Netherlands cannot dismantle an institution in Manila. Only Filipinos can do that.

What Needs to Happen

This is where I want to name what’s required, specifically.

The Marcos administration must stop treating ICC cooperation as a diplomatic chip and start treating it as a legal obligation. This is not about politics. It is about whether the Philippines can claim to be a rule-of-law state.

Congress must hold meaningful hearings—not performative ones—on police reform. Every piece of testimony from The Hague is admissible in that political forum. Use it.

The Commission on Human Rights must be fully funded and shielded from political interference. Its budget cuts in recent years are not administrative decisions. They are signals about accountability.

Victim families and civil society must be supported to engage the ICC process actively—not as passive recipients of international justice, but as participants who carry what they learn back into Philippine advocacy.

And every Filipino who follows this trial must reject the sovereignty trap. Ask anyone who invokes it a simple question: where was your sovereignty when thirty thousand were being shot? Sovereignty is not just freedom from foreign interference. It is the obligation to protect Filipino lives. A government that failed that obligation does not get to invoke sovereignty as a shield.

The Window Is Not Closed

The ICC trial will be slow. It may outlast Duterte himself. It will not, on its own, transform the Philippine state.

But it has created something that did not exist before: a moment of international visibility, permanent testimony, and political cost for inaction. That moment will not last forever.

The question is what we Filipinos do with it.

Thirty thousand names are waiting for the answer.

(Bong Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines.)