Series: The Hague Is Not The Way
You are reading Part 4 of 7. Catch up here: Part 1, The Case, the Court, and the Question Nobody Is Asking | Part 2, The Legal Maze | Part 3, Sovereignty
This blog post is a plain language, easy to read version of a longer scholarly paper. If you prefer a more detailed, fully documented, and academically rigorous treatment of these issues, the complete scholarly paper is available for download at the end of this post. For those who prefer listening rather than reading, a companion Spotify podcast covering the entire series is also available near the end of this post.
Forum Shopping, Great Powers, and a Court With Interests of Its Own
Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that we set aside everything Part 2 said about jurisdiction and everything Part 3 said about sovereignty. Suppose we grant the ICC every legal point it claims for itself. A hard question would still remain, and it is the question this part asks: is the International Criminal Court actually the neutral, apolitical referee it presents itself to be, or is it a political actor with interests of its own, operating in a world run by great powers who wrote its rules and then exempted themselves?
That is not a cynical question. It is a scholarly one. Political scientists have spent decades studying how international organizations really behave, as opposed to how their press releases say they behave. In this part, we take the two most influential answers from that field, the theory of Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore on international organizations as independent political actors, and John Mearsheimer’s realist critique of international institutions, and we hold the ICC’s actual record up against them. Then we look at how the Philippine case, the case against Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, arrived at The Hague, and ask the oldest question in politics: who benefits?
As always in this series, nothing here is a defense of the drug war, and nothing here claims Senator Dela Rosa is innocent or guilty. He is presumed innocent. The victims are real, the deaths are real, and the demand for accountability is right. The question is not whether there should be justice. The question is whether the institution claiming the exclusive right to deliver it is what it says it is.
From Law to Politics: The Question Nobody Can Avoid
Lawyers ask whether a court may act. Political scientists ask why a court acts when it does, against whom it does, and for whose benefit. Those are different questions, and the second one is often more revealing than the first.
Roman lawyers had a phrase for it: cui bono, meaning “who benefits?” When an institution makes a discretionary choice, and prosecution is always a discretionary choice, the honest analyst looks at who gains from that choice. In the Philippine case, the timing, the targets, and the political context all tell a story that the legal documents alone do not. To read that story properly, we first need the theory.
Understanding the Theory
Barnett and Finnemore: International Organizations Have Minds of Their Own
In their landmark 2004 book Rules for the World, political scientists Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore studied how international organizations like the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank actually behave. Their finding overturned the common assumption that these bodies are simply neutral servants of their member states. Three ideas matter for us:
1. International organizations are bureaucracies.
They have staff, budgets, careers, office politics, and reputations to protect. Once created, they develop interests of their own: growing their mandate, defending their relevance, and securing their funding. They are not machines that simply apply rules. They are organizations of ambitious human beings.
2. Their power comes from appearing neutral.
Barnett and Finnemore showed that international organizations gain authority precisely by presenting themselves as impartial, technical, and above politics. The appearance of neutrality is not incidental to their power. It is their power. That is exactly why the claim must be tested rather than assumed.
3. Bureaucracies develop predictable pathologies.
One they call bureaucratic universalism: the habit of applying a single template to every country, ignoring local context, because that is what the organization’s rules and routines reward. Another is insulation: the organization stops hearing voices from outside its own professional world.
A simple analogy. Think of a homeowners association that a few neighbors set up to keep the subdivision orderly. Ten years later it has permanent staff, monthly dues, a newsletter, and a habit of citing the small homeowners for every violation while the biggest houses on the hill, owned by the people who fund the association, never seem to get inspected. Nobody planned that outcome. It is simply what organizations do when their survival depends on their patrons. Barnett and Finnemore’s point is that international organizations are not exempt from this logic. They are prime examples of it.
The ICC Is Not Just a Courtroom. It Is a Bureaucracy.
Apply Barnett and Finnemore to the ICC and the picture sharpens immediately. The ICC is a permanent institution with roughly nine hundred staff and an annual budget of about 195 million euros, funded mostly by its wealthier member states, with Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom among its largest contributors. It has careers to advance, a reputation to defend, and after two decades of expensive operation, a record it is sensitive about: a small number of convictions, long trials, high profile collapses, and a growing chorus of critics asking what all that money has bought.
An institution under that kind of pressure needs wins. And here is the uncomfortable observation: the Philippine situation is, from the Office of the Prosecutor’s point of view, an attractive case. The suspects are from a state that cannot retaliate. The evidence base is large and public. And for a period, the government in Manila was politically willing to cooperate against its own former officials. None of that tells us the case is legally wrong. It tells us the case is institutionally convenient, and Barnett and Finnemore teach us that convenience shapes bureaucratic behavior far more than mission statements do.
If anyone still doubts that the ICC is an organization of ordinary, fallible, political human beings rather than a temple of pure justice, the events of this very year should settle it. On July 24, 2026, the court’s own member states voted to remove Prosecutor Karim Khan from office, the first removal of a chief prosecutor in the court’s history, following an independent investigation into sexual misconduct findings. Khan denies wrongdoing and his defenders call the process politicized. Notice that both sides of that dispute prove the same point: either the court’s chief prosecutor committed serious misconduct, or the court’s disciplinary machinery was captured by politics. On either reading, this is an institution subject to the same ambition, rivalry, and pressure as any other, and the man who signed the warrant against Senator Dela Rosa was himself removed from office a year later.
There is also the pathology Barnett and Finnemore call bureaucratic universalism, the single template applied everywhere. The ICC’s template was built for collapsed states: places with no functioning courts, no legislature, no capacity to prosecute anyone. Whatever else may be said of the Philippines, it is not that. It has a working (if imperfect) judiciary, a specific law criminalizing crimes against humanity (Republic Act 9851, discussed in Parts 2 and 3), and an active political opposition. Treating Manila like a failed state is not neutrality. It is an organization running its standard routine because the routine is what it knows.
Figure 1
Where the Court Has Actually Looked: Formal ICC Investigations Since 2002, by Region
Africa 10 situations
Uganda, DR Congo, Darfur (Sudan), Central African Republic I and II, Kenya, Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burundi
Asia and the Pacific 3 situations
Afghanistan, Bangladesh/Myanmar, Philippines
Eastern Europe and the Caucasus 2 situations
Georgia, Ukraine
Middle East 1 situation
Palestine
Latin America 1 situation
Venezuela
14 years
From 2002 to 2016, every formal ICC investigation was in Africa
100%
Every person the ICC has convicted of its core crimes has been African
0
Nationals of the US, China, Russia, or India ever taken into ICC custody
Source: ICC situations under investigation, official court records, as of mid 2026. Core crimes means genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Look carefully at Figure 1. It does not say the people the ICC prosecuted were innocent. Many were convicted on strong evidence of terrible crimes. What the figure shows is a pattern of selection. For its first fourteen years the court investigated only one continent, and to this day every single person it has convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes has been African. The non African docket that came later, Georgia, Ukraine, Palestine, Venezuela, Myanmar, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, has one striking feature: with the partial exception of Palestine, none of it touches a great power that can strike back, and where it did touch one, as we will see below, the court paid dearly for it.
Understanding the Concept
What Is Forum Shopping?
Every child knows the basic move. If Mom says no, ask Dad. If Dad says no, ask Grandma. You are not changing your request. You are changing the decision maker, hunting for the one most likely to say yes.
Lawyers call this forum shopping: choosing where to bring a case not because that court is the natural or proper venue, but because it is the venue most likely to deliver the result you want. Domestic legal systems actively discourage it, with rules about proper venue and jurisdiction, precisely because a system where litigants pick their favorite judge is a system where outcomes track strategy rather than justice.
In international law the opportunities multiply, because there are many bodies with overlapping mandates, domestic courts, foreign courts, UN committees, regional commissions, and the ICC. A complainant who fears losing at home can go abroad. A government that wants a rival neutralized without dirtying its own hands can let a foreign institution do the work.
The test for forum shopping is timing. When the choice of forum changes not because the law changed but because the politics changed, that is the signature. Keep that test in mind as you read the next table.
Forum Shopping, Manila Edition: The Two Calendars
Part 3 traced how the UniTeam alliance between the Marcos and Duterte camps collapsed between 2022 and 2025. Here we lay the legal calendar beside the political calendar. Read the two columns together and ask yourself whether the movement of this case has tracked the law, which barely changed, or the politics, which changed completely.
| The Legal Calendar | The Political Calendar |
|---|---|
| April 2017. A Philippine lawyer files the first communication asking the ICC to examine the drug war. | President Duterte is at the height of his power. His critics have little hope in domestic forums controlled by his allies, so they go abroad. Understandable, and already forum shopping. |
| 2018 to 2021. Preliminary examination opens, the Philippines withdraws from the Rome Statute, and in September 2021 judges authorize a formal investigation. | Duterte remains in office and refuses all cooperation. The investigation exists on paper but cannot move an inch inside the country. |
| 2022 to 2023. The investigation resumes after a pause. Manila says it will not cooperate, then hints it might “study” its options. | The UniTeam wins the 2022 election, then begins to crack. As relations between the Marcos and Duterte camps sour, the government’s tone toward the ICC softens in step. |
| March 11, 2025. Former President Duterte is arrested in Manila on an ICC warrant and flown to The Hague the same day. | By now the alliance is in open war: the Vice President faces impeachment moves and the midterm campaign is raging. The state that “could not” cooperate for years executes a flawless arrest in hours. |
| November 2025 to May 2026. A sealed warrant is issued for Senator Dela Rosa, unsealed in May 2026, followed by the failed arrest attempt of May 11 and the Supreme Court’s refusal to block a new one. | Dela Rosa is a sitting senator, a top vote getter, and a pillar of the Duterte bloc heading toward 2028. Removing him from the board weakens one side of Philippine politics, and only one side. |
Table 1. The legal calendar and the political calendar, side by side, 2017 to 2026.
Now apply the timing test from the box above. The law of the case scarcely moved between 2021 and 2025. What moved was the politics. Cooperation arrived exactly when the ICC’s targets stopped being the government’s friends and became its rivals. That is the signature of forum shopping, and it means the ICC is not functioning here as a court of last resort. It is functioning as an instrument in a domestic power struggle, which is precisely what the complementarity principle was designed to prevent.
So, cui bono? Who actually gains from this case being in The Hague rather than in a Philippine courtroom?
| Actor | What They Gain from The Hague | How Much of That Is About Justice? |
|---|---|---|
| The administration | Its chief rivals for 2028 are removed or besieged by a foreign court, while the government keeps its hands formally clean: “we are merely cooperating.” | Very little. The same government could instead charge the same men under RA 9851 in Philippine courts, and has not. |
| The ICC prosecution | A rare, badly needed win: a cooperative arrest of famous defendants, at the very moment the court is under American sanctions and internal scandal. | Mixed. Real accountability may result, but the institutional hunger for a success story is doing real work in case selection. |
| The Duterte camp | Strange as it sounds, a martyr narrative: “foreigners are persecuting our champions,” which mobilizes voters far better than a domestic trial would. | None. It is grievance politics, but the foreign forum is what makes the grievance sellable. |
| The victims’ families | A trial ten thousand kilometers away, in a language and system foreign to them, that may take a decade and touches only a handful of the most senior names. | This is the tragedy. The people with the strongest claim to justice gain the least from the forum everyone else is fighting over. |
Table 2. Cui bono: who benefits from The Hague as the forum.
Understanding the Theory
Mearsheimer and the “False Promise” of International Institutions
John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is the best known living voice of the school of thought called realism. Realists believe that in a world with no global government, states, especially great powers, act to protect their own power and security, and everything else, including law and morality talk, tends to bend to that fact.
The core claim
In his famous 1994 essay “The False Promise of International Institutions,” Mearsheimer argued that institutions like courts, leagues, and treaty bodies are “basically a reflection of the distribution of power in the world.” The strong write the rules, fund the referees, and exempt themselves. Institutions therefore have little independent power to restrain anyone who matters. They restrain the weak, because the weak have no choice.
A simple analogy
Imagine a basketball league where the referees are hired, paid, and fired by the three biggest teams, and where those three teams have written into the league rules that fouls can never be called against them. The referees may be sincere. Some of their calls may be correct. But you would not call the officiating neutral, and you would notice that every technical foul in league history has been called against the small teams.
The prediction. If Mearsheimer is right, an international criminal court will prosecute the nationals of weak states, avoid the nationals of powerful states, and be punished whenever it forgets its place. If he is wrong, we should see the court applying its rules evenly, upward as well as downward. That is a testable prediction. The next section runs the test.
The Great Power Test
Here is Mearsheimer’s prediction laid against the record. One table, six countries, one question: what happens when the ICC’s principles meet power?
| Country | ICC Member? | What Happened | The Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | Never | The Afghanistan investigation originally covered alleged abuses by US personnel. In 2021 the prosecutor “deprioritized” that part of the case. When the court later issued warrants touching Israel, Washington sanctioned the prosecutor and four sitting judges in 2025, freezing assets and restricting travel, on top of earlier sanctions in 2020. | No American ever charged. The court itself was punished. |
| Russia | No | The court issued a warrant for President Putin in March 2023 over the deportation of Ukrainian children. In September 2024 Putin flew to Mongolia, an ICC member state legally obliged to arrest him, was welcomed with honors, and flew home. | Warrant unenforced. No real consequence for Mongolia. |
| China | Never | Grave, well documented allegations concerning Xinjiang have been raised before UN bodies for years. Complaints filed with the ICC were declined for lack of jurisdiction, since China never joined. | Nothing. Outside the court’s reach by design. |
| India | Never | The world’s most populous nation simply never signed up, and has never been touched by the court in any way. | Entirely outside the system. |
| Israel | No | Warrants were issued for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant in November 2024. In April 2025 Netanyahu visited Hungary, an ICC member. Instead of arresting him, Hungary announced its withdrawal from the court. The United States answered the warrants by sanctioning the court’s own judges and prosecutor. | Warrants unenforced. A member state walked out rather than comply. |
| Philippines | Withdrew in 2019 | A former president was arrested within hours of the warrant reaching Manila in March 2025 and was in a cell in The Hague by the next day. A sitting senator now faces the same machinery. | The one place the warrant machine worked flawlessly. |
Table 3. The great power test: same court, same principles, very different outcomes.
Read the last row again. The only country in that table where the ICC’s authority operated swiftly, completely, and without resistance is the weakest one, and the only one where cooperation served the governing faction’s domestic interests. Mearsheimer’s prediction did not merely pass the test. It ran the table.
A Court Without a Police Force
Why does the pattern in Table 3 exist? Not necessarily because the judges are corrupt. The deeper reason is structural: the ICC has no police force. Not one officer, not one marshal, not one jail van. Every arrest depends entirely on some state’s police being willing to make it. Which means the court’s power is never really its own. It is borrowed, and it can only be borrowed from governments that see an advantage in lending it.
Figure 2
The Enforcement Gap: Warrants Are Easy, Custody Is Rare
Public arrest warrants issued since 2002 about 60
Suspects who ever actually reached ICC custody roughly half
Joseph Kony was the subject of the court’s very first warrants in 2005. More than twenty years later he has never spent a day in custody.
Omar al-Bashir, then a sitting president, has been under ICC arrest warrants since 2009. He visited ICC member states, including South Africa in 2015 and Jordan in 2017, and none arrested him. He remains outside ICC custody to this day.
Source: ICC public case records. Figures approximate, counting publicly known warrants for core crimes.
Sit with the implication. A warlord evaded the court for two decades. A sitting president toured member states untouched for a decade. A nuclear armed president received a red carpet in a member state a year after his warrant. And a Filipino senator, from a country that formally left the court seven years ago, is expected to submit immediately, and is called a fugitive from justice when he objects that his own country’s courts should hear the matter first.
A court whose orders bind only those too weak to resist is not enforcing law in any meaningful sense. It is transmitting power. That is not name calling. It is the precise, technical conclusion of three separate bodies of political science.
Three Theories, One Conclusion
Notice something important. The three scholars in this series’ political analysis disagree with each other about almost everything. Barnett and Finnemore are constructivists who believe institutions have real independent power. Krasner, whom we met in Part 3, studies how sovereignty norms are honored selectively. Mearsheimer is a realist who thinks institutions barely matter at all. These are rival schools. Yet on the question before us, they converge.
Figure 3: Three Rival Schools, One Verdict on the ICC
Barnett & Finnemore
The court is a bureaucracy with interests of its own: budget, relevance, and the hunger for wins shape which cases it pursues.
Krasner (Part 3)
Sovereignty rules are “organized hypocrisy”: preached to everyone, enforced only against the weak.
Mearsheimer
Institutions reflect the distribution of power: the strong write the rules and exempt themselves.
Whatever else it is, the ICC is not a neutral referee standing above politics. It is a political actor operating inside great power politics, and its Philippine case cannot be understood apart from that fact.
When rival theories that agree on nothing else all predict the same behavior, and the observed record matches that prediction in detail, the reasonable response is not to keep repeating the institution’s mission statement. It is to update our picture of the institution.
The Politics Scorecard
As in Parts 2 and 3, we close the analysis with a scorecard. Each row states the claim the ICC’s defenders make, what the record shows, and where the argument lands.
| The Claim | What the Record Shows | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| “The ICC is a neutral judicial body above politics.” | A bureaucracy with its own budget, interests, and pathologies, whose own chief prosecutor was removed by a political vote of member states in July 2026. | Not supported |
| “Case selection follows the gravity of crimes, not the weakness of targets.” | Fourteen years of Africa only investigations, every core crime conviction African, no national of the US, China, or India ever pursued at all, and the warrants against Russians sitting unenforced on paper. | Not supported |
| “The Philippine case reached The Hague on legal merits alone.” | Cooperation arrived precisely when the targets became the government’s rivals. The legal calendar stood still while the political calendar drove events. | Not supported |
| “The court can enforce its warrants against anyone.” | Kony free for two decades, al-Bashir untouched for over fifteen years, Putin feted in a member state, Netanyahu’s visit triggered a member’s withdrawal. Only Manila delivered. | Not supported |
| “Even so, the victims are better served in The Hague.” | A distant, slow forum reaching only a handful of senior names, versus a domestic path under RA 9851 that could reach further and answer to the victims’ own community. Contested, but the assumption deserves far more scrutiny than it gets. | Genuinely contested |
Table 4. The politics scorecard.
The Hard Truth This Post Is Making
None of this makes the drug war defensible, and none of it makes Senator Dela Rosa innocent. Those questions belong to a courtroom, and this series has argued from Part 1 that the courtroom should be a Philippine one.
What this part establishes is narrower and harder: the institution asking Filipinos to trust it with their most painful national reckoning is not a neutral referee. It is a political actor, embedded in great power politics, selecting cases the way institutions under pressure select cases, and enforcing its will only where enforcement is cheap. The Philippines is where enforcement is cheap.
Justice for the dead of the drug war is a debt that must be paid. But a debt this sacred should not be collected by an institution whose scales tip toward power, in a forum chosen because it was politically convenient, at a moment chosen because it was politically useful. The victims deserve justice, not a proxy war wearing justice’s robes.
Quick Recap: Four Things to Remember from This Post
1. International organizations are political actors. Barnett and Finnemore showed that bodies like the ICC are bureaucracies with their own interests, and that their authority depends on an appearance of neutrality that must be tested, not assumed. The removal of the court’s own prosecutor in July 2026 is a reminder that it is run by fallible, political human beings.
2. The Philippine case bears the signature of forum shopping. The law of the case barely moved between 2021 and 2025. The politics moved completely, and cooperation with the ICC arrived exactly when the court’s targets became the administration’s rivals.
3. The court’s record fails the great power test. No national of the United States, China, or India has ever faced any ICC proceeding. Russian leaders, including Putin, have arrest warrants, but the warrants sit unenforced, and not one national of those four powers has ever seen the inside of an ICC cell. The only place the machinery worked perfectly was Manila, the weakest party at the table.
4. Rival theories converge on one verdict. Constructivists, sovereignty scholars, and realists disagree about nearly everything, yet all three frameworks predict, and the record confirms, that the ICC operates as an instrument within great power politics, not above it.
Coming in Part 5
Part 4 examined the politics. Part 5 turns to the sociology and anthropology, and to the hardest critique of all: the colonial one. We look at how the ICC performs universality while practicing selectivity, why African states that once championed the court came to call it an instrument of neocolonial control, what scholars like Kamari Maxine Clarke found when they studied the court’s culture up close, and what it means when the legal heirs of empires sit in judgment over the countries they once ruled. If Part 4 made you question the court’s neutrality, Part 5 will ask a deeper question: whose idea of justice is being universalized, and who never got a vote?
Theological Meta-Framework
Put Not Your Trust in Princes, Nor in Their Courts
Everything political science discovered the hard way, Scripture asserted long ago. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3). The doctrine of the Fall does not stop at individuals. Institutions built by fallen people inherit fallen natures: they seek their own survival, favor their patrons, and bend justice toward power. That is as true of an international court in The Hague as it is of a police force in Manila. Barnett and Finnemore’s “bureaucratic pathologies” are, in an older vocabulary, simply sin operating at institutional scale.
This is why the series keeps returning to Romans 13. The sword of justice is given to the governing authority that stands in covenant with, and answers to, the community it governs. When Paul faced trial, he did not appeal to a distant tribunal of well meaning foreigners. He claimed the jurisdiction of the system that held lawful authority over him: “I stand at Caesar’s judgment seat, where I ought to be judged” (Acts 25:10). Proper authority, proper forum, real accountability to the affected community: that is the biblical shape of justice.
And yet common grace cuts both ways. Imperfect institutions, including Philippine courts, can still deliver real, if partial, justice, which is exactly why the burden of this series is not despair but responsibility: the Filipino republic must do the work itself. Part 7 will develop this framework in full.
For Scholars and Deeper Readers
Download the Complete 62 Page Scholarly Paper
The full paper contains the complete political science analysis summarized in this post, with full citations, footnotes, and the integrated nine lens framework. Free, no sign up required.
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References
Barnett, M., & Finnemore, M. (2004). Rules for the world: International organizations in global politics. Cornell University Press.
Bosco, D. (2014). Rough justice: The International Criminal Court in a world of power politics. Oxford University Press.
Clarke, K. M. (2019). Affective justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist pushback. Duke University Press.
Human Rights Watch. (2025, June 5). US sanctions International Criminal Court judges.
International Criminal Court. (2026, May). Situation in the Philippines: ICC judges unseal arrest warrant against Ronald Marapon Dela Rosa for alleged crime against humanity. Press release.
International Criminal Court. (2026). Situations under investigation. Official court records.
Krasner, S. D. (1999). Sovereignty: Organized hypocrisy. Princeton University Press.
Mearsheimer, J. J. (1994). The false promise of international institutions. International Security, 19(3).
Republic Act No. 9851. (2009). Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide, and Other Crimes Against Humanity.
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. (1998). United Nations Treaty Series.
United Nations News. (2026, July 24). International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan dismissed.
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