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

Watch explainer video in English:

Watch explainer video in Filipino:

Three words. That’s all it took. Nanlaban — he fought back — appeared in police report after police report for six years. A phrase so routine it stopped looking like a justification and started looking like a checkbox. On February 24, 2026, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague spent the better part of a day explaining what that word actually covered up.

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

Read Day 3: What the Duterte Defense Is actually arguing 

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

Day two was a different kind of heavy from day one. The jurisdictional arguments of the opening session gave way to something more granular — maps, lists, timestamps, and the story of a 17-year-old dragged into an alley who begged for his life before being shot twice in the head. The Office of the Prosecutor called it building the “architecture” of the case. What they were really doing was tracing a line from Duterte’s speeches to the bodies on the ground.

Pre-Trial Chamber I is deciding whether there are “substantial grounds to believe” that crimes against humanity were committed. The judges have 60 days after the hearing wraps to rule on whether the case proceeds to full trial.

The script behind the killings

Prosecution lawyer Edward Jeremy walked the court through what he called a pattern of near-identical nanlaban reports. Copy-pasted. Scripted. Not incident documentation — cover stories.

Kian delos Santos is the reason that argument lands. The official police report on his death said he fought back. CCTV footage and witnesses said he was dragged into a dark alley and killed. Prosecutors didn’t present his case as an outlier. They presented it as the version of events that happened to get filmed.

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

Forensic pathologist Dr. Raquel Fortun didn’t testify, but her work ran through the prosecution’s account anyway. Victims shot in the head at close range. No gunshot residue on their hands. And then this detail, which should stay with every reader: many of the dead had teeth that had never seen a dentist. Victims’ lawyers described the drug war, plainly, as a war against the poor.

The Kill List was an instrument, not a rumor.

Jeremy also put the “PRRD List” before the court — what prosecutors called a “dead list.” National-level high-value targets. Barangay-level drug lists maintained by local police and village officials. Stack them together and you get a targeting system: identify, sanction, kill.

These weren’t hypothetical names. Albuera Mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr. was on the list. Ozamiz City Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog was on the list. Both are dead.

Prosecutor Robynne Croft then put up data maps of thousands of killings from 2016 onward — not scattered events but concentrated waves, specific geographies, particular time windows. Her point was methodical: this kind of geographic and temporal clustering doesn’t emerge from rogue officers making independent decisions. It emerges from policy.

The numbers, stated plainly

The prosecution put figures on the record. They are not easy to read in sequence:

• 274 killed in Davao City during Duterte’s mayoral period — a floor figure, based on public reporting.
• 1,500 to 2,000 bodies allegedly buried at Laud Quarry, per witness testimony from that same period.
• 5,823 anti-drug killings recorded during the presidential years, counted by an independent organization.
• 6,000+ deaths acknowledged in the Philippine National Police’s own reports.
• 30,000 estimated total deaths, from various human rights groups.

The raw count matters less than what the prosecution called the transition from the Davao Model to national scale. What Duterte ran as city mayor, they argue, he scaled up when he moved to Malacañang. That continuity is the structure they’re asking the judges to see.

The co-perpetrators: Not obscure names

Duterte is not the only name in the charges. ICC prosecutors identified key officials as co-perpetrators , people who, they argue, jointly controlled the apparatus that made all of this possible:

• Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, then PNP Chief — who prosecutors say expanded the Davao Model nationally and issued internal memos using the word “neutralize.”
• Christopher “Bong” Go, Special Assistant to the President — alleged to have maintained the chain of authority between the executive office and those carrying out operations.
• Vitaliano Aguirre II, Secretary of Justice — alleged to have used the DOJ to protect perpetrators from prosecution, publicly defending the killings while blocking accountability.

Worth saying directly: these are not names from the past. Dela Rosa and Go are sitting senators. The confirmation hearing is the first time these arguments have been laid out in open court. That is constitutionally significant, and the Senate has yet to answer for it.

The language that cleared the path

Filipino victims’ lawyer Gilbert Andres ended day two on a different note , not forensics, but linguistics. He argued that before the killings could happen at scale, language had to do its work first. Adik. Pusher. Nanlaban. These weren’t just words. They were a classification system that turned people into acceptable targets.

The prosecution also brought testimony about children. Edward Jeremy described kids with their heads wrapped in packing tape to silence screams before being strangled with wire, then “sold” to funeral homes. The prosecution’s framing: this level of systematic violence against minors isn’t possible unless the policy environment has already signaled that no one will be held to account for anything.

What the defense said

Defense lawyer Nick Kaufman held his position: Duterte is innocent, the charges are politically motivated, and his speeches were bombastic political style not operational orders. The defense also repeated its jurisdictional challenge: the Philippines withdrew from the Rome Statute in 2019, and the ICC should have stepped back then.

Duterte wasn’t in the courtroom. He waived his right to appear. The court has noted his age and health but has ruled him fit for the pre-trial stage.

What we can do before the 60-day clock runs out

The hearing resumes February 27 for day three. After it concludes, the judges have 60 days to rule. That window is not an abstraction. It’s a window for public pressure, civic engagement, and accountability journalism. Here’s what that looks like concretely:

• Track the hearing directly. Inquirer Global Nation, ABS-CBN News, and the Philippine News Agency are filing live updates from The Hague. Read the original reports, not derivative summaries.
• Name the co-perpetrators when you share updates. The story isn’t only about Duterte. Senators dela Rosa and Go are named in the charges. That detail belongs in every post, caption, and group chat update.
• Counter nanlaban in your networks. When someone defends the drug war as legitimate self-defense, the Kian delos Santos case exists. CCTV footage. Witnesses. The police report didn’t match either. Share it.
• Support victim-documentation organizations. Groups like Rise Up for Life and Rights continue building the case record. Their documentation is what gives the ICC something to work with.
• Ask your senators directly. Dela Rosa and Go have constituents. Those constituents have a right to ask: do you dispute the ICC’s account of your role in the drug war?

The Marcos administration surrendered Duterte to the ICC in 2025 — and then kept questioning the court’s jurisdiction in the same breath. That contradiction hasn’t been resolved. At some point the government has to decide: either the ICC has legitimate authority over Filipino officials, or it doesn’t. The evidence presented over two days in The Hague doesn’t wait for that answer.

Duterte told the police to kill. The prosecution says he was pivotal in the deaths of thousands. Day two laid out exactly how the instruction moved — from a speech, through a list, through a hierarchy of officials who kept the system running. The judges have to determine whether that’s enough for trial.

The sharper question for the rest of us: if the charges are confirmed, will the two senators named as co-perpetrators , still in office, still collecting their allowances , be asked to answer for what the prosecution says they authorized?

Videos, infographics and slideshow generated on NotebookLM from sources related to Day 2 of the ICC confirmation charges hearing.