Duterte's 'Drug War' Case Enters Substantive Trial: Hague Court Confirms Former President's Fitness to Stand Trial

International Criminal Court judges ruled on Thursday that Philippine former president Rodrigo Duterte is fit to stand trial, and will face a crimes against humanity trial in The Hague on November 30. According to Al Jazeera reports, if convicted, the 81-year-old former leader will face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

During his tenure as Philippine president from 2016 to 2022, Duterte launched a campaign of state violence against drug suspects under the banner of a "drug war." The Philippine national police released a death toll exceeding 6,000, while human rights organizations estimate the number could be as high as 30,000. This discrepancy itself reveals the operational logic by which the state apparatus systematically conceals violence—many of the dead were executed without formal judicial proceedings, and their families have long been denied official recognition or compensation.

In its ruling, the court stated that independent medical experts, after physical examination, determined that Duterte is mentally competent and "able to effectively exercise his fair trial rights in the proceedings." Duterte's defense team had previously sought to have the case dismissed on the grounds of severe memory decline, claiming he could not absorb new information or reliably recall the past—an argument that was rejected. The judges also denied his request for release.

The prosecution accused Duterte of authorizing police and government "death squads" to carry out dozens of killings, some motivated by financial reward, others by perpetrators seeking to avoid becoming the next targets themselves. Duterte denies all charges, insisting that he only ordered police to "act in self-defense" during anti-drug operations. During his time in office, he lent political legitimacy to the bloody agenda on the strength of his persistently high approval ratings.

In March 2025, Duterte was arrested in the Philippines and then transferred to the International Criminal Court's headquarters in The Hague, becoming the first former Asian leader to be arrested in the court's history. Last month, he made his first in-person appearance before the court in The Hague.

The Duterte case has seen the Hague court unusually place a former Asian head of state in the dock for crimes against humanity. But the symbolic significance of the trial itself should not obscure structural limitations: the court reaches only a single departed leader, unable to hold accountable the institutional roots of state violence; those Philippine poor who were gunned down in slum alleys, whose deaths were disguised as "self-defense," and whom their families buried in silence, have received neither a formal state apology nor systematic compensation. The International Criminal Court's enforcement record has historically been concentrated on leaders from African and some Asian countries, while consistently lacking equivalent vigor in prosecuting the deaths and displacement caused by military interventions led by Western countries—this selectivity is itself a footnote on the deep imbalance of the global accountability order.