MANILA – The petitions questioning the Philippine government’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) were dismissed by the Supreme Court (SC) on Tuesday.
SC moved for the dismissal of the petitions for being moot and academic since the country’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute – the treaty that created the ICC – already took effect in March 2019, a year after President Rodrigo Duterte announced the pullout.
Since the petitions were already moot and academic, the SC no longer resolved the issues but Associate Justice Marvic Leonen issued “guidance on when the treaty may be unilaterally withdrawn.”
During the oral arguments, Leonen expressed doubts if the SC can annul ICC’s decision to accept the country’s withdrawal from the statute.
“Therefore, the power of the President to withdraw unilaterally can be limited by the conditions for concurrence by the Senate or when there is an existing law which authorizes the negotiation of a treaty or international agreement or when there is a statute that implements an existing treaty,” the tribunal said.
In 2018, Duterte announced the withdrawal from ICC, claiming that the tribunal was being used as political tool against him. He also maintained that the treaty did not take effect in the country because it was not published in a newspaper of general circulation. The move came after Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said that ICC was opening a preliminary examination on the drug war in the Philippines, following receipt of reports of alleged extrajudicial killings during police anti-drug operations.
Senators Francis Pangilinan, Franklin Drilon, Bam Aquino, Leila de Lima, Risa Hontiveros, and Antonio Trillanes IV filed the first petition on Duterte’s move invoking that the treaty requires concurrence of at least two-thirds of the members of the Senate.
Philippine Coalition for the ICC followed it up with its own petition claiming that Duterte committed grave abuse of discretion when he decided to withdraw from the ICC solely based on “capricious, whimsical, ridiculous, misleading or misled, incoherent and/or patently false grounds, with no basis in fact, law or jurisprudence.”
In response to the twin petitions, the Duterte administration argued that while the Constitution states that the Philippines can enter an international agreement only with the concurrence of at least two-thirds of all the members of the Senate, it does not require the same when terminating a treaty./PN
