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MANILA, Philippines — “One death is one too many.”
It’s a phrase often heard when casualties are reported — from floods and disasters to, for many Filipinos, the extrajudicial killings that cannot be forgotten during former president Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody drug war.
Political scientists say these words ring just as true in Duterte’s crimes against humanity case before the International Criminal Court (ICC): drug war deaths are far from mere statistics.
Legal experts have also pointed this out over the past year, explaining how, in international criminal law, an alleged attack does not require a specific number of victims to qualify as a crime against humanity.
“What is important is that there are deaths and that they resulted from a systematic attack against a civilian population,” Michael Tiu, assistant professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law, said.
So, for Duterte’s defense to attack the prosecution’s methodology, he explained to Philstar.com, it was most likely an attempt to “create doubt” on the prosecution’s claims.
‘Lives cannot be reduced to ratios’
When Duterte’s lead counsel, Nicholas Kaufman, presented his defense, he relied on official figures of drug-related deaths also cited by the prosecution to argue that there was no “widespread and systematic attack.”
He attempted this by framing the fatalities against the much larger number of police operations conducted, instead of recognizing the reported deaths alone.
The problem here, according to College of Saint Benilde School of Diplomacy and Governance Dean Gary Dionisio, is that human rights are not supposed to be measured by ratios.
“The legality of state action does not depend on whether deaths are statistically smaller than arrests. Even one extrajudicial killing is a constitutional violation,” he told Philstar.com.
“The issue is not percentage — it is whether there was tolerance, encouragement, or systematic failure to investigate unlawful killings,” he added.
Kaufman repeated this approach in Duterte’s defense at least three times. First, he cited the government’s 2017 year-end achievement report, which tallied deaths and arrests in anti-illegal drug operations during Duterte’s first year in office.
He described the deaths as “minimal” compared with the number of arrests, presenting in a pie chart that they accounted for just 3% of total operations. This, he argued, even though the reported death toll nearly reached 4,000 that year.
Political scientist Cleve Arguelles explained that while data is essential for shaping public policy, using it to “obscure” or “sanitize” a state campaign that resulted in deaths merely “echoes older colonial logics of rule.”
“From a human rights perspective, no democratic state should ever be comfortable describing thousands of deaths as statistically insignificant,” he told Philstar.com.
Duterte’s defense also cited the nearly 1,900 drug-related investigations conducted on policemen in 2017 and 375 who were later dismissed, criticizing the prosecution for not pointing this out.
Drawing on these figures, Kaufman insisted that Duterte only instructed the police to kill if their lives were in danger during operations and that the former president did not condone the abuse of power.
In short, the defense maintained that Duterte didn’t have a state policy to “kill” suspected drug personalities or criminals since more arrests were made and that some officers were reportedly held accountable for perpetrating rights violations.
‘Policies don’t need to be on paper’
The second comparison came when Kaufman said that Duterte’s “narco list” — which the prosecution referred to as a “kill list” — was intended for arrests, not killings.
That figure was 248 deaths among 4,817 names on Duterte’s narco list, which Kaufman said showed a “5% chance” of fatalities. For him, this demonstrated “no virtual certainty” that the list would lead to killings or that it was part of public policy attributable to Duterte.
However, Arguelles argued that in political science, a state policy is not limited to formal documents with explicit instructions. It can also take shape through “repeated executive messaging, incentive structures, and budgetary priorities” that leaders may prefer not to put in writing.
“So the issue is not the size of these killings but the pattern: that there is evidence to show that is systematic, predictable, and institutionally sanctioned,” he said.
Dionisio shared the same understanding, saying policies can also be written in patterns. All he needed was to shape bureaucratic behavior, they said, not a written “kill order.”
“When a president repeatedly endorses lethal force, promises protection to enforcers, and killings surge during that period, that shift in institutional behavior is not accidental,” Dionisio said.
This, Arguelles said, was evident in “Oplan Tokhang,” with directives passed down from headquarters to local units, the existence of reporting mechanisms, and performance metrics.
A review of the drug war policies was published in the Philippine Journal of Public Policy in 2020.
He added that populist leaders often govern through “signaling” rather than paperwork. For Duterte, repeated calls for killings and assurances to police were directives in themselves.
“From an institutional perspective, leadership rhetoric and protection cues matter. Presidents shape bureaucratic behavior — especially in highly centralized systems like ours,” he said.
Legally, Tiu said this is why circumstantial evidence can suffice, especially in cases where there is “no smoking gun” directly linking the former president to the alleged crimes, as the defense argued.
“In fact, for most cases of top-down relationships or links in modes of liability, circumstantial evidence is often used because it is rare that there is a ‘smoking gun’ in these cases,” he said.
‘Deaths were the norm’
The third instance Kaufman compared figures was when he argued drug-related killings would persist regardless of who was president. He cited UP’s Dahas project, which reported over 300 deaths carried out by state agents during President Bongbong Marcos’ first year.
For Kaufman, the prosecution’s omission of these figures misleads the court, reinforcing his narrative of Duterte as a victim and not a perpetrator in the former president’s own drug war.
Although drug-related killings existed before and after Duterte, Arguelles and Dionisio said the defense ignored the sharp rise in deaths when he assumed office, or simply how he “altered the scale” of violence and “normalized it as public policy.”
Nonetheless, a death is a life lost — and one too many, especially at the hands of state agents, as Arguelles puts it.
Duterte’s week-long confirmation of charges hearing ended on February 27. The Pre-Trial Chamber I has 60 days to decide on whether the former president’s case proceeds to trial.
