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HEARING. Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla testifies during the Senate committee on foreign relations public hearing on the roles of the International Criminal Court on the arrest of former president Rodrigo Dutere, on March 20, 2025.
Senate Social Media Unit
But it also bears looking at what the Marcos government has done in the last three years
MANILA, Philippines – Philippine Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin “Boying” Remulla said on Thursday, March 20, that the local justice system was weak to prosecute former president Rodrigo Duterte, saying publicly what has been said in whispers for the last years — that prosecutors were under pressure not to taint the administration’s war on drugs.
“Nung panahon na ‘yun nagkaroon po tayo ng problema ‘nung panahon na ‘yun, na hindi ho talaga maimbestigahan nang maayos kasi pati piskal tinatakot ng pulis ‘nung mga panahong ‘yun,” Remulla said on Thursday during a Senate hearing called by Senator Imee Marcos to investigate the propriety of Duterte’s arrest. A fiscal is a prosecutor.
(At the time we really had a problem at the time, it really cannot be investigated because even fiscals were threatened by the cops back then.)
This came out of a tense exchange between Remulla and Marcos, in a hearing that effectively accused the government of her brother, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., of illegal arrest.
During Duterte’s time, human rights lawyers blasted prosecutors for being too passive in the issue of drug war killings, saying that they should play an active role of running to the crime scene each time there’s a dead body. Thousands of cases, however, never entered the justice system.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) works on complementarity, or assessing whether local justice is unable and unwilling to investigate and prosecute the same people for the same crimes.
“‘Yung mga nagpunta sa ICC, sinubukan nilang kumuha ng hustisya sa Pilipinas pero nabigo sila (Those who went to the ICC tried to get justice here in the Philippines but they failed),” said Remulla, who oversees prosecutors.
Police threatening investigators and prosecutors is something that Rappler has heard from sources in the years that we have been investigating the local cases related to the war on drugs, but they were never willing to say it on the record. What was publicly apparent during Duterte’s time was the Department of Justice or the DOJ’s deference to the police and to Duterte when it launched a reinvestigation in 2020.
When he took over as Marcos’ justice secretary in the middle of 2022, Remulla said that they had difficulty gathering witnesses for case buildups. Once in a press conference when asked whether his DOJ would specifically investigate Duterte, Remulla got defensive and said: “Nasubukan ‘nyo na ba ‘yung aming will para maayos lahat ‘yan?” (Have you tried our will to fix it?)
Rappler has also investigated the dearth of police reports on the killings that occurred in their operations.
Remulla said on Thursday that it’s also what they encountered.
“Ni police report nga wala eh, ganun ho kahirap imbestigahan ang mga kasong ‘yan…[Pulis] po ang naglalagay ng recording ng lahat ng pangyayari sa kanilang komunidad, eh kung police report po wala, saan kayo magsisimula?” said Remulla.
(There’s not even a police report, that’s how hard it is to investigate. Police are supposed to record everything that’s happening in their community, but if there’s no police report, where do you start?)
But it also bears looking at what the Marcos government has done in the last three years. Rappler has found that the reinvestigation of 52 cases, which started under Duterte and spilled over Marcos’ time, produced no substantial results and was seen as only deceiving victims’ families.
The Commission on Human Rights was consistently kept out of the loop in the investigation during Duterte’s time, but even under Marcos’ time, the police were still able to withhold some documents.
Remulla claims there’s been an improvement. “Mas maayos ngayon, sapagkat sinisigurado po namin ngayon na ang piskal at ang pulis, magkasamang mag-imbestiga ng mga krimen, hindi katulad nang dati,” said Remulla. (It’s better now, because we make sure that police and prosecutors work together to investigate crimes, unlike before.) – Rappler.com
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