[The Slingshot] Christmas is cold in Den Haag

I wish to greet the family of the prisoner Rodrigo Duterte a merry and meaningful Christmas. Despite the biting cold of the Dutch winters, may his family members who are with him in The Hague find the peaceful and accepting forbearance that this may be the first, if ever, of many Christmases they hope to spend with him in the Netherlands. 

For prisoner Duterte will never be back in the Philippines ever, if we go by the jurisprudential trend of the International Criminal Court’s pre-trial  chamber 1.

Every trick in the lawyer’s book of Nicholas Kaufman had crashed and burned — the interim release, the issue of non-jurisdiction because the Philippines withdrew from the Rome Statute in 2019, and Rodrigo Duterte not being fit to stand trial due to cognitive impairment. 

It is easy to read Kaufman’s intentions: stop the trial, secure the client’s release, or delay the proceedings. 

Enter Robin Padilla with an analysis that he thinks is rocket science and which he entitled, “Asking for Justice from the Creator.” 

Padilla: “You are crucifying an 80-year old man, you denied him the house arrest that the Filipinos are demanding.” Did we? The Filipinos in my neck of the woods didn’t. Check your neighborhood, folks, if your neighbors did.

Padilla said the sanctions that restrict ICC judges and prosecutors from accessing US-based banking services, credit card companies, and technology platforms such as Amazon and Uber, are part of God’s revenge on the court for denying Duterte’s freedom.  

Disclaimer: like Padilla I am no international relations expert or claim to be one like Alantroy Rogando Sasot. We don’t need to be because the aim of the Trump administration is easy to read, unless we come from the DDS Fake News Farm like they do.

The US’ ICC sanctions are NEVER about Duterte. As early as June this year, Rappler had already performed a fact check that Duterte is not the reason for the US sanctions against some ICC judges. The fake news was published in the YouTube channel “Philippines Trending News,” which at that period had 526,000 subscribers.

Robin Padilla’s “justice from the Creator” is a reprise of that fake news garbage. The original headline was “Malaking good news! Sobrang napahiya ang Palasyo sa balitang ito. Lahat nataranta?” (Good news! The Palace was utterly humiliated by this news. Everyone panicked?)

It was a typical clickbait headline that normally attracts Duterte Diehard Supporters to fall into trollist conclusion without the need for verification and vetting. This was even if the video narration made the flagrant falsehood that the four ICC judges sanctioned by Trump were handling the Duterte case.

Rappler’s June 2025 fact check said: “The US sanctions were due to the war tribunal’s issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by US troops in Afghanistan.”

“The ICC judges sanctioned by Trump’s administration are Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, Luz del Carmen Ibañez Carranza of Peru, Reine Adelaide Sophie Alapini Gansou of Benin, and Beti Hohler of Slovenia.”

Alapini Gansou, one of the three  judges involved in the Duterte pre-trial case, is also involved in the Netanyahu case, hence the reason for her inclusion. Ibañez Carranza, who ruled against the Kaufman plea for interim release in her capacity as an ICC Appeals judge, is also part of the Netanyahu case.

Although the sanctions have nothing to do with the Duterte case, we can only read the minds of his family and fans of the ridiculous scenario in their dreams — that eventually the ICC will fold up and hence will send prisoner Duterte home.

The ICC will not necessarily be driven to despair by the US. A non-member country, the US knows that the ICC had long survived without American moolah. The tribunal’s top contributor is in fact Japan. The rest of its top 10 contributors are Germany, France, the UK, Italy, South Korea, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and Australia.  

Sweden is a major supporter of the Trust Fund for Victims (TFV) with substantial multi-year commitments. Then there is the powerful European Union and all its member states that collectively contribute significantly, both directly and through specific programs.

Salaries for instance, do not come from the US. Judge Ibañez, however, remits her salaries to her home in Peru. In which case, the transfer passes through financial applications that use US dollars. 

Can the ICC survive the sanctions? 

The Trump sanctions are discretionary on the president, that is one limitation. Secondly, it will be selective by actually excluding US citizens working in the court as well as court functionaries from close ally countries such as the UK. In which case, the Philippine government is a close US ally.

JusticeInfo.net zeroed in on the Netanyahu case as an example:

“In the current circumstances Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor, is a British national. The two main individuals in charge of the Palestine investigation, standing behind Khan in his video announcing the arrest warrants last May, are Brenda Hollis, who is a U.S. citizen who cannot be put on a sanctions list because it’s only for foreign persons, and Andrew Cayley from the UK.”

Khan, however, is presently on leave. Hollis and Cayley are not. But they are safe. Notice the selectivity.

As we write, “court officials and others are working to come up with workarounds and figure out a way to do business that doesn’t involve transacting foreign currency exchanges through New York,” JusticeInfo avers.

Can the ICC still pay salaries?

The Economic Times reports that 2025 salaries have already been paid in advance. It also reports that the tribunal has already started considering alternative sources for banking services and software. Suffice it to say that there is no dearth of that in the EU. 

The latest sanctions can also put the US on a collision course. Under the Rome Statute, judges and prosecutors are elected by the ICC’s state parties. The ICC insists that the rule of law cannot be undermined.

“When judicial actors are threatened for applying the law, it is the international legal order itself that is placed at risk,” the court said. Already, Dutch foreign minister David van Weel has condemned the US sanctions. 

So we expect pushbacks and diplomacy when necessary. But overall, the tribunal will not fold up.

The Duterte case will soon proceed to full trial status. A year from now, prisoner Duterte will still spend Christmas at the Scheveningen Detention Unit, and more Christmases thereafter, hopefully for the sake of Philippine rule of law. 

Merry Christmas, prisoner Digong. Advance happy new year, Bato dela Rosa. – Rappler.com