(Eagle News)–The Palace is predicting a dismissal of the motion urging the International Criminal Court to determine whether it can investigate the Philippines war on drugs.
In a statement, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said the Palace believes the ICC’s decision would be consistent with its ruling on the communication filed by former Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario and former Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales against China’s President Xi Jinping and several others.
“Dismissal for lack of jurisdiction is the logical end to the ICC’s preliminary examination on the merits of the move to investigate the country’s war on drugs,” Panelo said, which he said meant that the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC should rule that the “preconditions for their court’s exercise of jurisdiction over the matter have not been met.”
In the first place, he said that while the Philippines “may have been a signatory to the Rome Statute, its membership did not place it under the jurisdiction of the ICC because the law that created it did not comply with the publication requirement to pass the due process test imposed by our Constitution, especially because the instrument is penal in nature.”
In short, he said the ICC “never acquired jurisdiction over Philippines, the latter’s membership thereat being void initio.”
“Necessarily thereat, it did not give birth to any legal effect,” he said.
He added the allegations of extrajudicial killings did not fall under the definition of crimes against humanity of the ICC, and that admissibility of any case before the ICC must also pass the test of complementarity.
He said this meant the Philippines “should first be unable or unwilling to prosecute the alleged crimes against humanity in our jurisdiction.”
“There is no evidence that this administration is unable or unwilling to prosecute crimes against humanity,” he said, adding that the Philippines must not be waylaid by any force, internal or external, in going about its task of serving and protecting the Filipino people.
“Any resort therefore to a foreign tribunal relative to the management of our country’s state policies is utter disrespect, and any complainant who does it who is a citizen of the Republic, is an infidel to the sovereign aspirations of this Republic,” Panelo said.
