The Hague Is Not The Way, Part 1: The Case, the Court, and the Question Nobody Is Asking

The Philippines is watching one of its senators face arrest by a foreign court for crimes allegedly committed on Philippine soil, against Filipino victims, under a Philippine government. Before we debate whether Dela Rosa is guilty or innocent, we should ask a more fundamental question: is this even the right court?

On November 7, 2025, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, former Chief of the Philippine National Police, for crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the Duterte administration’s drug war. Within 24 hours, the Philippine Senate went into closed session. The President’s spokesperson called it an affront. Former President Duterte’s allies called it a political persecution. Human rights groups called it long overdue.

Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion. Very few had a framework.

This series is a framework. It is not a defense of Ronald Dela Rosa. It is not a defense of the drug war. Let me be direct: extrajudicial killing is wrong. Every person who died without trial, without due process, and without justice was a human being made in the image of God, and their deaths represent a moral failure that demands accountability. That is not in dispute here.

What is in dispute is this: who should deliver that accountability, through what process, and in what forum?

The paper this series is based on, The Hague Is Not The Way: Why the ICC’s Warrant Against Dela Rosa Is the Wrong Justice in the Wrong Place, is a 62-page comprehensive multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and normative transdisciplinary scholarly paper. It examines those questions through nine distinct academic lenses: law, sovereignty, political science, international relations theory, sociology, anthropology, post-colonial theory, public health and criminology, and ethics. It then integrates all of those lenses through a theological meta-framework that provides the author’s governing interpretive architecture. This first post introduces the problem, the stakes, and the methodological approach. The remaining six posts will go lens by lens through the full argument.

A note on the presumption of innocence: This paper and series treat Dela Rosa, Duterte, and all others named as presumed innocent until a competent court finds otherwise. The analysis does not assume guilt. It argues about forum, process, and sovereignty.

The Numbers Behind the Noise

The drug war was not a rumor. It produced documented, measurable death at a scale that demands accounting. The government’s own data placed the number of deaths during police anti-drug operations at approximately 6,252 between July 2016 and May 2022 (Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, 2022). Human rights organizations, using broader methodologies that included deaths by unknown assailants, estimated figures between 12,000 and 30,000 (Human Rights Watch, 2017; Amnesty International, 2019).

The geographic and demographic pattern was not random. The dead were overwhelmingly from urban poor communities: Payatas, Caloocan, Bulacan, Cebu. They were predominantly young men aged 18 to 35 (Carlos, 2020). They were not drawn from the political, economic, or social classes that control the institutions that would investigate their deaths.

Those numbers carry moral weight. They are why this conversation matters. And they are also why getting the forum right matters, because justice done in the wrong court, through the wrong process, with compromised political motivations, is not justice fully delivered.

Why Nine Lenses? Because One Is Never Enough

Most commentary on the Dela Rosa case picks a lane: legal experts debate jurisdictional technicalities; human rights advocates foreground the victims; political analysts see a Philippine power struggle; Duterte loyalists call it foreign interference. Each of these perspectives captures something real. None of them captures the whole.

The paper this series is based on does something different. It uses nine distinct academic disciplines simultaneously, not as competing analyses that contradict each other, but as complementary lenses that illuminate different dimensions of the same problem. Think of it like a medical diagnosis: a cardiologist, a neurologist, and an immunologist looking at the same patient will each find something the others might miss. The most accurate diagnosis comes from the team, not from any single specialist.

Here is a map of all nine lenses and the central question each one asks about the Dela Rosa case:

The Governing Framework Above All Others

The nine disciplinary lenses do the analytical heavy lifting. But what integrates them into a single coherent position is a theological meta-framework rooted in the author’s scholarly identity as a polymath who approaches all questions through a theologically grounded interpretive architecture.

This is not religion inserted into politics. It is the author’s explicit, confessional starting point: that theology provides the normative foundation upon which all of the other disciplines ultimately rest, whether they acknowledge that foundation or not. Legal concepts like due process presuppose that human beings have inherent dignity. Political science concepts like legitimate authority presuppose a standard against which authority is measured. These presuppositions are ultimately theological, and making them explicit produces more honest scholarship.

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The Central Argument: Stated Plainly

Before diving into the legal and theoretical complexities in the parts that follow, it is worth stating the paper’s central conclusion in plain language so readers always know where we are going.

The paper argues four interconnected things:

First: The ICC’s jurisdiction over the Philippines after its 2019 Rome Statute withdrawal is legally contested in ways that the majority ruling does not fully resolve. The dissenting opinion of Judge Gocha Lordkipanidze raises serious textual arguments about Article 127(2) of the Rome Statute that deserve rigorous engagement, not dismissal (International Criminal Court, 2026a).

Second: Even if the ICC’s jurisdiction is legally valid, the complementarity principle that is supposed to be the ICC’s safety valve against overreach is not being applied correctly. The Philippines’ own Republic Act 9851 provides a domestic legal framework for prosecuting crimes against humanity. The question is not whether Philippine courts can handle this, but whether there is the political will to make them do so.

Third: The ICC’s investigation and warrant cannot be fully separated from the political context that produced them. The Marcos administration’s cooperation with the ICC, against its predecessor’s government, at a time of intense factional warfare in Philippine politics, raises legitimate questions about forum shopping and the weaponization of international justice for domestic political purposes (Teehankee, 2016).

Fourth: The victims deserve better than this. They deserve accountability that is rooted in their communities, delivered through a process accountable to their families, and grounded in the Philippine legal tradition that is supposed to serve them. The Hague is not that place.

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A First Look at the Jurisdiction Question

The ICC’s jurisdiction over the Philippines after its 2019 withdrawal is not as settled as its proponents claim. The full legal analysis comes in Part 2 of this series, but it is worth sketching the basic problem here so readers understand what is at stake.

The Philippines ratified the Rome Statute in 2011. In March 2018, then-President Duterte announced withdrawal from the treaty after the ICC opened a preliminary examination into the drug war. The withdrawal became effective on March 17, 2019, meaning the Philippines ceased to be a member state of the Rome Statute on that date.

The ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber authorized a full investigation in September 2021, more than two years after the withdrawal became effective. In October 2025, the Pre-Trial Chamber ruled unanimously that the ICC retains jurisdiction over crimes committed during the Philippines’ membership period (November 1, 2011 to March 17, 2019), notwithstanding the withdrawal. The Appeals Chamber affirmed that ruling in April 2026 (International Criminal Court, 2026b).

However, Judge Gocha Lordkipanidze filed a partly dissenting opinion that raises a serious textual challenge. His argument, grounded in the plain language of Article 127(2) of the Rome Statute, is that the majority’s interpretation stretches the treaty’s text beyond what its ordinary meaning supports. The paper takes that dissent seriously, not as a basis for dismissing the ICC’s jurisdiction, but as evidence that the jurisdictional question is genuinely contested in ways that matter for how we evaluate the legitimacy of these proceedings (International Criminal Court, 2026a).

What Is Coming in This Series

This is Part 1 of a seven-part series. Here is where we are going:

Each part is readable on its own. But the full argument is only visible when all seven are read together. The nine lenses do not reach the same answer independently. They are weighed and integrated through the theological meta-framework in Part 7.

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A Final Word Before We Begin

This series will make some people uncomfortable. Those who believe Dela Rosa should be in The Hague will find arguments they do not want to hear. Those who believe the drug war was entirely justified will find a paper that insists the victims were real, their deaths were morally catastrophic, and accountability is non-negotiable.

Both discomforts are intentional. This is not advocacy for Dela Rosa. It is advocacy for a form of justice that is genuinely accountable to the Filipino people, rooted in Philippine legal institutions, and free from the kind of political contamination that compromises both the proceedings and their outcomes.

The people who died in the drug war deserve that. And so does the republic that is supposed to deliver justice in their name.

Part 2: The Legal Maze is coming soon. Subscribe to be notified.

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