Duterte has won a mayoral election but he remains in prison. The law still matters
If you think you’re having a bad week at work, spare a thought for the Filipino strategists and advisors of the defeated candidates in Davao City’s recent mayoral election. They all lost by colossal margins to an 80-year-old who is not only awaiting trial on charges of crimes against humanity but is doing so in a foreign prison. Not for the first time, Rodrigo Duterte has defied all conventional wisdom about politics – as well as common sense.
Duterte was the mayor of Davao City – the Philippines’ third-largest urban centre in terms of population – on and off from 1988 to 2016, when he began an eventful stint as the country’s president. During that time, his children Sara and Sebastian took turns running the metropolis. Sara is currently the vice-president of the Philippines and Sebastian will serve as his father’s vice-mayor. It was as president that Duterte racked up the indictment that led him to The Hague in March. Human-rights groups estimate that his brutally literal interpretation of the phrase “war on drugs” led to the deaths of some 30,000 people. Many of those killed might well have been narcotics dealers or traffickers but the police and paramilitaries unleashed by Duterte rarely stopped to confirm this. As recently as last October, he cheerfully testified to a Filipino investigation that he had personally directed an off-the-books death squad of hitmen who he described as “gangsters”.
Duterte always justified the violence of his crackdown on the Philippines’ pestilential drug trade by calling it war. But war is governed by laws. Duterte’s arrest is a welcome reminder that Earth has not completely descended into a Hobbesian free-for-all, even if the planet’s recent history might have given that impression. Over the past few years, Russia has unleashed horrendous violence upon Ukraine for no good reason; Israel, though certainly provoked, has punitively pounded Gaza to rubble; and US citizens have re-elected a convicted criminal as their president.
Yet the rule of law is hanging in there. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, are wanted men. Neither can travel entirely unburdened by the worry that someone at the other end might try to serve the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court. Should Donald Trump not find a way to install himself as president-for-life, he could still be reacquainted with the charges hanging over him from his first term or – since he’s just getting started – presented with charges pertaining to his second.
All of this might not seem like much but it’s not nothing. If Duterte’s incarceration prompts one despot to pause before barking intemperate orders and consider that actions today can have consequences tomorrow, it might save lives. In 1998, Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London by UK police serving an Interpol warrant issued by a Spanish judge for crimes committed during his dictatorship two decades previously. The law has not just a long arm but also a long memory.
Mueller is the host of Monocle Radio’s ‘The Foreign Desk’. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
