Day 4: What “Superman” ordered: Five things the ICC hearing proved about Duterte’s war

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The chair reserved for Rodrigo Duterte at Pre-Trial Chamber I sat empty on February 27. His lead counsel, Nicholas Kaufman, stood in his place, citing age, citing health, citing a jurisdiction Duterte refuses to acknowledge. The Court did not pause. It proceeded.

Read Day 1: The drug war goes to The Hague: Inside Duterte’s confirmation of charges hearing

Read Day 2: “Nanlaban” was a lie. The ICC just spent a full day proving it.

Read Day 3: What the Duterte Defense Is actually arguing 

I have been waiting for this moment of accountability for nearly a decade. Official police records alone acknowledge more than 6,000 deaths during the 2016 to 2022 War on Drugs, a figure that does not capture what human rights monitors documented independently. The question before Pre-Trial Chamber I is no longer whether people died. It is whether the man who ordered it can be held accountable under the Rome Statute, the treaty the Philippines signed and later fled.

1. THE NAME BEHIND THE ORDER

“Superman” was how witnesses knew him. It was the codename long associated with Duterte and the Davao Death Squad. At the February 27 hearing, the prosecution introduced testimony linking that name to a direct telephone order authorizing killings. In international criminal law, this is what lawyers call “functional control”: the evidentiary standard required to hold a head of state responsible for crimes carried out by thousands of officers across hundreds of operations.

When Kaufman attacked the prosecution’s redacted filings as leaving “virtually nothing intelligible” for the public, Presiding Judge Iulia Motoc corrected him on the record. The defense held the full, unredacted documents. The redactions protected witnesses, not the prosecution’s case. That correction, delivered from the bench, set the tone for what followed.

2. WHAT “NEUTRALIZE” ACTUALLY MEANT

The hearing placed official PNP language under a forensic microscope. Police Chief Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa’s operational circulars used terms like “neutralize,” “Oplan Tokhang,” and “narco-list.” The defense argued these were standard law enforcement vocabulary. The prosecution argued they were a system of plausible deniability: bureaucratic language engineered to authorize killings while keeping the word “kill” off the page.

The prosecution’s summary was hard to argue against. When a suspect appears on the narco-list on Monday and turns up dead in a gutter on Tuesday, marked “neutralized” in the after-action report, the dictionary definition of the word stops mattering.

3. THE 10% RULE AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY PROVES

Victims’ representative Gilbert Andres presented a single figure to the Court that does more damage to the Philippine government’s position than almost any single testimony. Between July 2016 and November 2017, official records acknowledged 3,967 deaths in police operations. The government investigated at most 302 of those cases, roughly 10 percent. Convictions were virtually non-existent.

This is not a caseload problem. A justice system overwhelmed by volume makes mistakes, closes cases late, and acquits for lack of evidence. It does not investigate 10 percent and stop. The ICC’s “unwilling or unable” standard for complementarity, the legal test that determines whether the Philippines can handle this case itself, was answered by the Philippine government’s own numbers.

4. THE SURVIVAL PARADOX DID NOT HOLD

Kaufman pointed to “Incident 14,” the raid on the Parojinog family where the mayor was killed but four suspects survived, as proof there was no systematic intent to murder. His logic: if the policy was to kill everyone, why did anyone live?

The prosecution dismantled this quickly. Selective use of force does not cancel a systematic policy. The 49 charged incidents and 78 named victims are not presented as a complete count. They are representative samples of a broader, state-orchestrated attack on a civilian population. A few survivors do not exonerate a state for the thousands who did not.

5. THE HONG KONG SPEECH WAS NOT POLITICAL HYPERBOLE

Days before the hearing, Duterte addressed an audience in Hong Kong. He described the drug war killings as a “necessary evil” and told the crowd he wished to be remembered as a leader who stood with a gun rather than a book.

Prosecutors used this as their closing argument for criminal intent. In international law, demonstrating that a leader knew, approved, and publicly embraced a policy of lethal force matters to the question of guilt. Duterte did not make this statement under cross-examination. He offered it voluntarily, in public, days before judges would weigh whether he possessed the intent required for crimes against humanity.

WHAT THE COURT WILL DECIDE IN 60 DAYS

Pre-Trial Chamber I has four options before late April 2026:

• Confirm all charges. The case proceeds to full trial on all 49 incidents.
• Confirm partial charges. The trial is limited to specific timeframes, such as Davao-era crimes versus the Presidential-era war on drugs.
• Request additional evidence. The prosecution is given time to close specific evidentiary gaps.
• Decline to confirm. The case is dismissed, a move legal observers describe as unlikely given the record already established.

THE 60-DAY COUNTDOWN BELONGS TO ALL OF US

For each of those 60 days, the Marcos administration will maintain its calculated ambiguity. It will publicly question ICC jurisdiction while not physically blocking the proceedings. But the Senate has already moved beyond ambiguity.

The Senate’s answer is on record. In the same week the confirmation hearing opened, the pro-Duterte minority bloc filed Senate Resolution 307 to protect Filipinos from surrender to international courts. The timing was not coincidental. Dela Rosa and Go are sitting senators named as co-perpetrators in the same case being heard in The Hague.

The 10 percent rule is not an abstraction. For 90 percent of the families whose loved ones were killed in police operations and never saw an investigation opened, the ICC is the only court that chose to show up. Before the April decision lands, ask your senator whether Senate Resolutions 307 is the position they want attached to their name when the judges issue their ruling.

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