The Knock Came Back
On April 23, 2026, three judges at the International Criminal Court unanimously confirmed the charges against Rodrigo Roa Duterte and sent him to trial. Crimes against humanity. Three counts. Murder and attempted murder committed on the territory of the Philippines between November 1, 2011 and March 16, 2019, in the context of the campaign he called the war on drugs.
I want to say clearly that this is a good day. Not a triumphant day. The dead are still dead, the mothers of Southblock 7 still count empty plates, and the men I watched stand three rows deep in Calamba holding cells will not be compensated by an arrest warrant served at The Hague. But a door that was nailed shut has come open, and that matters.
The charges cover both the Davao Death Squad years and the presidency. The prosecutor presented evidence for 76 murders and 2 attempted murders across 49 incidents, and the court noted these were not exhaustive. The judges found substantial grounds to believe that Duterte and his co-perpetrators acted on a common plan to kill alleged criminals. Police in Manila have officially acknowledged around 6,000 deaths across the years of the campaign. Human rights groups have documented as many as 30,000. The confirmed charges name a fraction. They are not the whole accounting. They are the part the court could prove in February, in a hearing that ran from the 23rd to the 27th, with witnesses who have spent years afraid.
Duterte waived his right to attend the hearing. The day before the confirmation decision, on April 22, the Appeals Chamber also confirmed the court's jurisdiction over the crimes. Jurisdiction had been his main legal escape hatch since he pulled the Philippines out of the Rome Statute in 2018. That door is closed now too. The withdrawal did not erase the years the treaty was in force.
He has been in custody in The Hague since March 11, 2025, when Philippine police arrested him in Manila on an ICC warrant served through Interpol. He is 81. His defense argued at the hearing that the prosecutors had selectively weaponized his rhetoric, that his orders were defensive, that he never meant to incite violence. The judges were not persuaded enough to halt the trial. The trial itself is expected to begin in late 2026 or early 2027.
I heard someone say this week that the trial does not matter because the killings are over. The killings are not over. The machinery of tokhang did not retire with the man who built it. Watch lists still exist in municipalities across the country. Nanlaban, the official line that every shot fired was a suspect who fought back, is still the shape of most drug-related police reports in the Philippines. What ended in 2022 was one presidency. What did not end was the belief that the poor can be cleared from a neighborhood faster than they can be ministered to. A trial at The Hague will not dismantle that belief. It will put the argument that ministry is slower than extermination into a courtroom where the counterargument gets answered under oath.
About the survivors. The ones who made this day are not the lawyers. They are the families who kept names and photographs and cardboard signs. They are the witnesses who testified from other countries because it was not safe to testify from home. They are Senator Leila de Lima, who sat in detention for almost seven years because she started the first hearings. They are Chito Gascon, chair of the Commission on Human Rights, who did not live to see this day. They are Maria Elena Vignoli of Human Rights Watch, who said the decision opens the door to long awaited justice for the families. They are the RISE UP coalition of widows and mothers who kept showing up to courtrooms that did not want them. I do not know most of these people. I know the street they walked. I know what it looked like when the system they were trying to survive came to the holding cells I was standing in.
The arc of accountability is long. Argentina waited thirty years for the Dirty War convictions. Cambodia waited thirty for the first Khmer Rouge verdicts. Rwanda waited twenty-six for Kabuga. Karadžić was a fugitive for thirteen years and Mladić for sixteen, and both were convicted. The pattern, every time we have it recorded, is that once the proceedings begin, almost no one escapes permanently. This is the part of the pattern Duterte has now entered. Not sentencing. Proceeding. The trial will take a long time. It will be technical and painful and reported in fragments. He may die before verdict. The arc does not require him to live to matter.
What I will say as someone who walked the streets of Calamba and sat in the cells and ate rice with the men on the farm, is that the most excellent way has always known this would come. Not because it predicted a day on a court's calendar. Because the most excellent way knows that love is patient, and patience is what outlasts the hard way every time, even when the hard way controls the microphone for a season. Six thousand dead. Maybe thirty thousand. One trial at The Hague. One man in a courtroom who is finally being asked to answer for them. It is not enough. It is also not nothing. It is the beginning of the answer that the widows of Southblock 7 have been waiting for since the first knock.
Toktok. Hangyo. The knock came back. This time it is knocking on his door.
I counted seven with my eyes, but dissociated until I heard about the ICC.