Former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte arrested at airport for crime against humanity

Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was held by police at Manila’s international airport on Tuesday. He was arrested on the order of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Philippine government said.

Mr Duterte was arrested and taken into police custody after arriving from Hong Kong, President Ferdinand Marcos’ office said in a statement.

“Upon his arrival, the prosecutor general served the ICC notification for an arrest warrant to the former president for the crime of crime against humanity,” the government statement said. “He’s now in the custody of authorities.”

The arrest sparked a commotion at the airport, where lawyers and aides of Mr Duterte loudly protested that they, along with a doctor and lawyers, were prevented from coming close to him after he was taken into police custody.

“This is a violation of his constitutional right,” Senator Bong Go, a close Duterte ally, told reporters.

The Manila office of the International Police received an official copy of the arrest warrant from the global court, the government said. It was not immediately clear where Duterte was taken by the police.

The government said the 79-year-old former leader was in good health and was examined by government doctors.

The ICC has been investigating the massive killings that happened under the former president’s deadly crackdown against illegal drugs from November 1 2011, when he was still mayor of the southern city of Davao, to March 16 2019, as possible crimes against humanity.

Duterte was president from June 2016 to June 2022. He was mayor of Davao for three spells and vice mayor for one period from 1988 to 2016, spending only three years of that time not in office.

He withdrew the Philippines in 2019 from the Rome Statute in a move human rights activists say was aimed at escaping accountability over the killings.

The Duterte administration moved to suspend the global court’s investigation in late 2021 by arguing that Philippine authorities were already looking into the same allegations, arguing the ICC did not have jurisdiction.

Appeals judges at the ICC ruled in July 2023 that the investigation could resume and rejected the Duterte administration’s objections.

Based in The Hague, the ICC can step in when countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute suspects in the most heinous international crimes, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

President Marcos, who succeeded Mr Duterte in 2022 and became entangled in a bitter political dispute with the former president, has decided not to rejoin the global court.

But the Marcos administration has said it would co-operate if the ICC asks international police to take Duterte into custody through a so-called Red Notice, a request for law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and temporarily arrest a crime suspect.