Calls with Clarita Alia always have moments of sheer pathos. “Will his arrest bring back my sons? Of course not!” she said over the phone, through tears. But they were tears of joy, because Philippine authorities had arrested former President Rodrigo Duterte in Manila on March 11 and fl own him to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Days earlier, the court's judges had issued an arrest warrant against Duterte for his responsibility in the crime against humanity of murder, allegedly committed between 2011 and 2019. Alia, 71, is from Davao City in the southern Philippines, where Duterte, as mayor, developed the template for what became his bloody “war on drugs” after he became president. I first interviewed her in 2002, when I wrote one of the first major reports on the rise of the “Davao Death Squad,” a band of assassins Duterte allegedly formed and financed to target suspected criminals. Alia had already lost three of her seven children to the death squad when we spoke. Richard, 18, had been killed in July 2001; Christopher, 16, in October 2001; and Bobby, 14, in November 2002. A fourth son, Fernando, 15, was killed subsequently in April 2007. Her boys were among the hundreds of poor Filipinos suspected of some petty crime or another — often just illegal drug use — to be slaughtered on Davao’s streets. The killings were brazen. Alia’s sons were all stabbed to death, one of them with a butcher’s knife. I covered these extrajudicial killings for years as a journalist. Mothers kept losing their sons. Women and children kept losing their husbands and fathers. Friends kept losing friends in a frenzy of violence that the city’s residents and the Philippine public largely ignored. In 2009, bolstered by a report from Human Rights Watch, the governmental Commission on Human Rights opened an investigation into the Davao killings. The commission ended its inquiry in 2012 by asking the Office of the Ombudsman to look into possible liability of Davao officials. But no one was ever prosecuted. In 2016, Duterte rose to the presidency of the Philippines on the promise to eradicate crime and drugs using the same methods he had honed in Davao. This time, the killings took a more organized, more systematic turn, with the involvement of the Philippine police, as reports we and others issued showed. The targeted group remained the same — mostly impoverished Filipinos — but the death toll was in the thousands. Duterte also went after his critics, chief among them Leila de Lima, the former chair of the rights commission that investigated the death squad. She had since become a senator, but he had her arrested and detained for nearly seven years. Other critics were targeted with harassment and lawsuits, such as the journalist Maria Ressa, who later won a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts. Even as the inquiry began into Duterte’s anti-drug campaign, many Filipinos across the country and overseas tolerated and even celebrated the killings. This popular support for the “drug war” is one of the reasons relatives of victims pinned their hopes on the International Criminal Court. “We couldn’t rely on local courts — the justice system in the Philippines was not working,” Randy delos Santos told me this week. He was the uncle of Kian delos Santos, 17, whom police shot dead in 2017. Until Duterte’s arrest, many families felt that the quest for justice had become fruitless. Now that he has appeared before a court of law, their hope for some measure of justice has been revived. “They know it [a conviction] is a longshot, but they’re happy that the process has begun,” a volunteer from one of the Philippine groups helping victims told me. The case against Duterte in The Hague is a stark reminder of the importance of the International Criminal Court as a court of last resort, standing for equality before the law, with the potential to reach even those thought to be untouchable. But it is precisely because the court is pursuing its global mandate that it is currently under attack. In February, President Donald Trump issued an executive order authorizing sanctions against its officials and others supporting the court’s work, in a bid to shield U.S. and Israeli officials from facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court can overcome these challenges, but only with the support of the international community and its member countries. This is true when it comes to confronting the sanctions and to securing more arrests across the court’s docket. International Criminal Court member countries should step up their efforts to protect the court that they created to ensure that the victims of the most serious crimes have access to justice. Clarita Alia’s sons were killed before the Philippines joined the International Criminal Court, and so their deaths are not among those being investigated. “No case was ever filed in court, their killers remain free,” Alia told me between sobs. But with Duterte’s arrest, “I’m happy just the same.” Carlos Conde, a former journalist for The New York Times, is a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. ...read more read less