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Bella Cariaso - The Philippine Star
March 15, 2025 | 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines — As the International Criminal Court has formally taken custody of former president Rodrigo Duterte, only five Filipino lawyers are listed in the ICC roster and authorized to be part of proceedings.
University of the Philippines law professor Raul Pangalangan is the sole Filipino judge, although he is retired.
So far, five Filipinos included in the list of accredited lawyers of the ICC are Gilbert Andres, Joel Butuyan, Charles Janzen Chua, Nashmyleen Marohomsalic and former presidential spokesman Harry Roque.
The ICC has a mandate to prosecute those responsible for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community and its proceedings follow the highest standards of due process.
The Rome Statute guarantees victims, accused persons and, under certain conditions, suspects, the right to be assisted by counsel and the ICC strives to provide these individuals with a pool of highly qualified counsel.
Experienced lawyers who wish to represent defendants, victims or witnesses before the ICC must first be admitted to the list of counsels.
The admission is based on a lawyer’s experience and litigation skills, among other criteria graded meticulously in order to ensure the quality of legal representation.
Marohomsalic
Nashmyleen Marohomsalic is the first Filipina and Muslim lawyer accredited by the ICC.
Marohomsalic is a member of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines chapter in Lanao del Sur, her home province.
The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) has passed a resolution commending Marohomsalic for being chosen as an ICC-admitted counsel.
Andres
Gilbert Andres is deputy executive director of the Center for International Law Philippines (CenterLaw), a human rights and rule of law non-government organization.
Andres is chairman of the Advocates for Freedom of Expression Coalition-Southeast Asia, a coalition of 12 NGOs from the Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Myanmar, with CenterLaw serving as its co-secretariat.
He is a junior partner at the Butuyan and Rayel Law Offices, a litigation firm that also specializes in strategic public interest cases. He was a private prosecutor in the Maguindanao massacre case where 196 people were implicated in the murder of 58 people, including 32 media workers.
Butuyan
Joel Ruiz Butuyan, president of CenterLaw, is licensed to practice law in the Philippines and the United States. He obtained degrees in law and economics at the University of the Philippines, and a master of laws at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, USA.
In addition to public interest lawyering, he has 27 years of experience in private law practice in the fields of criminal, civil and commercial litigation, international arbitration.
He is also an MCLE lecturer on Human Rights, Freedom of Expression, Transnational Business Transactions and International Business Law.
Among significant public interest cases he handled were a writ of amparo case filed in the Supreme Court in representation of the families of 36 tokhang victims in San Andres Bukid, Manila, including the first anti-tokhang case filed where both the Court of Appeals and SC granted protection to the families of five victims in Payatas, Quezon City; an environmental case where the SC stopped a planned 40-hectare land reclamation project around Boracay island and Ampatuan massacre trial in the Regional Trial Court, representing families of 15 victims.
Roque
Former Duterte spokesman Herminio Harry Lopez Roque Jr. taught constitutional law and public international law for 15 years at the University of the Philippines College of Law.
Roque is a member of the Advisory Council of the Asian Society of International Law (AsianSIL) and was president of AsianSIL from 2018 to 2019.
Roque received his Bachelor of Arts (economics and political science) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1986), Bachelor of Laws from UP Diliman (1990) and Master of Laws with merits from the London School of Economics (1996).
Through the advocacy group Centerlaw, of which he was one of the founders, Roque and his team represented victims of the 2009 Ampatuan massacre; the Malaya Lolas, victims of systematic rape and abuse by the Japanese Imperial Army; the family of the killed transgender Jennifer Laude and the family of murdered environmental advocate and media man Gerry Ortega of Palawan.
Roque was nominated but failed to be elected to the International Law Commission. The ILC was instrumental in the creation of the ICC as it helped draft the statute defining the tribunal that tries genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.
Pangalangan
Pangalangan specializes in public international law and constitutional law, where he presided over the first ICC case on the war crime of attacking cultural and religious heritage.
Pangalangan has sat in landmark cases involving child soldiers, forced marriages and sexual slavery. He recently chaired the ILO Commission of Inquiry on Myanmar. He is currently a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and teaches law at the University of the Philippines College of Law.
He is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (The Hague) and chair of the Philippine National Group at the PCA. He is an associate member of the Institut de Droit International.
He currently sits in the administrative tribunals of both the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.
Pangalangan received his A.B. cum laude (1978) and LL.B. (1983) from UP and his LL.M. (1986) and S.J.D. (1990) from the Harvard Law School, where he won prizes for his thesis and dissertation. He received the Diplôme of The Hague Academy of International Law in 1987.
He is co-chair of the editorial board of the Asian Journal of International Law and the editor-in-chief of the Philippine Yearbook of International Law. He serves or has served in the governing councils of the Asian Society of International Law, the International Association of Constitutional Law and the Philippine Society of International Law.
