MANILA – A lawyer of former president Rodrigo Duterte has refuted allegations regarding their team’s proposed limitations on the identification process for victims involved in the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) investigation into the drug war.
According to Nicholas Kaufman, human rights attorneys Joel Butuyan and Kristina Conti were lying when they told the media that their petition before the ICC was recently rejected.
“Well, this whole thing about the judges rejecting my proposal, that never happened. All that happened was that there were two activist victims’ representatives by the names of Joel Butuyan and Kristina Conti who made all sorts of assertions in the press that I had asked to restrict victims’ participation in the process by limiting the ID documents that could be used. That never happened,” Kaufman told the media on Tuesday.
“All I was doing was relying on what the Philippines’ Social Security System requires for ID to be verified in the Philippines,” he added.
Kaufman was pointing to their “observations” which they submitted to the ICC’s Victims Participation and Reparations Sector (VPRS), a section in the international tribunal that is responsible for assisting victims in participating in proceedings and applying for reparations if a conviction occurs.
“So, this is not a question of the judges rejecting something that the defense asked for. This is the response that the defense made to the VPRS, which is the internal court unit, which is responsible for assessing victims applications,” Kaufman said.
“That’s all we did, we made observations. We didn’t make a request which was rejected. That’s a big lie,” he added.
Earlier this week, Butuyan and Conti commended the international tribunal’s ruling that rejected the purported request from Duterte’s camp to impose restrictions on identity documents for victims participating in the drug war.
Conti noted that the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber 1 determined that identification documents should not be limited to national IDs and passports, which many alleged victims do not possess.
Butuyan, in a separate statement, questioned the rationale behind Duterte’s camp requesting identification now, given that they “never required any form of ID from the victims before deciding to shoot and kill them in cold blood.”
The two lawyers were referring to the ICC Pre Trial Chamber I’s 20-page decision promulgated on April 17, which suggested that government issued IDs must be accepted as identity requirements./PN
