
Former President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte is now in the International Criminal Court Detention Unit following his arrest in Manila on charges linked to his “war on drugs” in which thousands of purported dealers and users were killed.
He’s been charged with crimes against humanity for his role in the anti-drugs crackdown while he was president from 2016 – 2022. He could become the first Asian former head of state to go on trial at the ICC.
Duterte was arrested at Manila airport on Tuesday and, within hours, was sent off on a chartered jet via Dubai to The Hague, despite his protests and some attempts to get the Supreme Court to intervene.
Why has he been arrested? Our colleague Lian Buan from Rappler explained the background: Local politics are part of the story – the current president and vice-president have fallen out. The VP is Duterte’s daughter. The president, Bongbong Marcos, had initially refused to cooperate with the ICC investigation, but as his relationship with the Duterte family has deteriorated, he changed his point of view. The ICC handover is the latest twist in the political saga. Sara Duterte, the vice-president has arrived to support her father in the Netherlands. According to the schedule she provided the media she is looking for a lawyer for him.
The ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor welcomed the arrest and said it “thank[s] all the victims, survivors, witnesses and activists from the Philippines who have stepped forward to cooperate in the Office’s investigation. Their strength, courage, and perseverance make these significant developments possible”.
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[INTRO TUNE]
Janet: 00:06 Hi, this is Janet. I’m by myself because Steph will join me later. We’re doing a quick emergency pod, because suddenly things are actually happening in The Hague. The narrative there has changed at the International Criminal Court. It’s suddenly back in business. This is a court that was sanctioned by the United States. Had no new detainees for the last three years, and now it’s landed a really big fish. They’ve got the former head of state in custody, Duterte of the Philippines. So just to make it clear, as you know, this has been a fast moving story over the last few days, and we’re recording this pod on Wednesday, the 12th of March, in the evening Hague time. What we’re going to do is to get the picture from our colleague, Lian Buan, who’s Senior investigative reporter at the well regarded media outlet Rappler in the Philippines. And then we’re going to hear from Steph, who is doing her duty in The Hague, inside and outside the ICC. So here she is, just for a quick clip on her own, watching from inside the ICC as the plane landed, and everybody wanted to know is Duterte on board.
Stephanie: 01:23 So I’m here in an empty ICC press room, and I’m watching the Reuters live feed of Duterte’s plane, which has touched down at The Hague Rotterdam airport. But as always with these things, they are prepared for journalists watching this, so they’re pulling up all these buses and vans that we can’t really see what’s going on. We see that there’s an ambulance there. We see there’s a helicopter. But that could be just precaution, and everybody is now glued to this live feed, or I think everybody in my office is glued to the live feed, but I’m here all alone in the ICC Press Center, because I think everybody is either at the airport or the detention center waiting for him to get home, and I’m being pinged all around by everybody asking, Is he arrived? Can we see him yet?
Janet: 02:10 Oh, we do have fun as journalists, don’t we? So let’s get everybody up to speed. This would usually be a Stephapedia. Sorry, today, it’s a Janetapedia. And what you need to know is that Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, has arrived in The Hague and he is due to stand trial at the International Criminal Court. He is accused of crimes against humanity in relation to the death of 1000s of small-time drug dealers and drug users who were killed in the Philippines without trial during the period when he was both mayor of a particular city and then the President. There is a curiosity here that the Philippines is not actually a member of the International Criminal Court anymore. It withdrew under Duterte, but the crimes that have been charged are for during the period that the Philippines was actually a member. But that’s going to be an issue we’re sure that the judges will raise. So we’re going to show you how it all played out and take you a little bit behind the scenes. I’m going to start for the first in the Philippines. I called Lian Buan, and she told me that Rappler, her media outlet, had actually decided to break the news of this secret, as it then was ICC arrest warrant at the weekend, because they had actually been expecting it for a long while, and because they have really good sources who have proved again and again that what they have to say is right, and they had confirmed that this was actually happening.
Lian Buan: 03:55 We’ve been waiting for this for a year. Our sources for the last how many years above the ICC, they’re always right, and so we’ve learned to trust that what they’re saying is right. It’s just sometimes they’re off by a stage. So when they say that the Chamber has already authorized an investigation, it will turn out that the prosecutor has already just applied for the investigation, and sometimes their tips are a reflection of their aspirations, but they’re always right. They’re just a bit off by two months, three months. So we’ve been preparing for this for a year. We know. So the entry of some ICC officials in the country, which you know, in the Duterte time was impossible, but we did know that some of them went here. But the thing where it got really serious was over this weekend, we got wind that it was go time, our sources had conviction that it was go time, that they’ve seen it, they’ve seen instructions, and so we did the hard decision, which is to publish something that we couldn’t attribute to anyone else. So it was sort of like nerve wracking, because we were breaking probably the biggest story at the time, and then quite scared that this may, all you know, explode in our faces, but we were, we had trust, and our sources didn’t fail us.
Janet: 05:21 The actual events over the last couple of days. I mean, it looked like he came back from Hong Kong. It looked like there was a possibility that you might end up with something in a local court, maybe the Supreme Court. It was very unclear that this arrest warrant was actually going to be served. Can you talk about how fast the whole process has been?
Lian Buan: 05:45 Tuesday morning was a, it was a whirlwind, because Monday we had every reason to believe that he was going to arrive in the afternoon, late afternoon, we were set for it. The same sources we trusted said he was going to arrive 4pm. We woke up very early on Tuesday, and a blogger, if you don’t know, for context, the title relies heavily on bloggers, she posted that the flight schedule has been changed to 10am. By the time I saw that, it was already 9am. I wasn’t going to make it to the airport, Janet, I really wasn’t going to make it to the airport, but I did, I rushed, and by some miracle Manila Manila’s roads opened up. It was the fastest I’ve I’ve reached from my house to the airport. I got there, there still wasn’t any news of Duterte landing in the airport, so I got there in time, and then everything that happened from the arrival in the airport was sort of like opening a door, finding another door closed. We didn’t know what was happening. We really didn’t know what was happening.
Janet: 06:50 Let me interrupt you, Lian, because we did know some of the things were happening because everybody kept on live streaming it. There were these Instagram lives going on. Is that typical for the Philippines?
Lian Buan: 07:01 I joked earlier today that all newsrooms should be thankful for the president’s daughter right about now. Her name is Kitty. She’s a Gen Z. She was live streaming and even catching like the best sound bites from what was happening. But at the time, Marcos only, our president only spoke when the plane had taken off. So everything we were seeing from the Instagram post, all the others, we knew there was something happening. We didn’t know what. What was it an arrest warrant? So I’ve had to kind of rely from my institutional knowledge of what some officials mean. So if I see that this official is here, then this is what it means. You know what I mean. That the top prosecutor was there, what does it mean? It’s hard to sort of rely on context clues. It was nerve-racking, to say the least, to be reporting on something that wasn’t really clear, but you could see it being Instagram. So it’s kind of surreal.
Janet: 08:00 You mentioned your president there. That’s President Marcos, and he made it clear in the end that an arrest warrant was being served, and it was bye, bye to Duterte. Can you just step back a little bit for us and explain what is going on at the top of Philippines internal politics? We understand it’s this kind of family loving and then struggle between two families, and because of the fallout, essentially, that’s why the arrest warrant was been served on the father of the vice president. I mean, it’s just crazy.
Lian Buan: 08:35 Yeah, it’s it’s really crazy, but that’s Philippine politics for you. So our president, Bongbong Marcos ran alongside Duterte’s daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte. They ran together. They promised unity. That was their platform. Their platform more than about her being at the prices of fuel or bringing down prices of food. Um, their platform was they will unite as a country, but three years into the term, they have split in a very public and nasty political split. They’re now enemies essentially. They’ve said mean things against each other, and it’s in the split that Marcos started becoming open to the possibility of enforcing, or at least facilitating the enforcement of an ICC warrant. It didn’t take him quickly to arrive to this position. He was very closed off to the ICC before, but as the political fallout was becoming clear, he was also becoming more clear of what he would allow to happen. And it was clear to us that if Interpol was in the picture, then an arrest is going to happen.
Janet: 09:44 And Interpol you mentioned there because the background also includes the fact that the Philippines is not a member of the ICC at the moment, it was a very strong and close member of the ICC. They even had a judge serving at the court, and then when Duterte was in power, they withdrew, but the arrest warrant and the investigation still stood, because it was concerning the time when the Philippines was a member. But does that mean that your current president has kind of tried to distance himself from the ICC. Do you think?
Lian Buan: 10:21 For sure, even at his press conference last night, he kept repeating that we are not enforcing an ICC warrant. He sets out these exact words. It just happens that the warrant came from the ICC, but we did this because of Interpol and not ICC. You could, you know, guess what his reasons are. Some of the guesses that’s been put out there is that an international court picking up someone would be too reminiscent of what happened to his father, the late dictator, being forced out of the Philippines, stepping on a plane and going to an exile in Hawaii. That’s why, I think, like he distances himself from the ICC. Even now he doesn’t want to discuss rejoining the International Criminal Court, so his government had to come up with a legal design to facilitate the enforcement of a warrant. But I would just also like to note that the victims of Duterte’s war on drugs doesn’t consider Marcos a hero. They don’t say – Thank you President Marcos for making this happen. Like they are, they know all too well that there’s politics behind it, but they want to make sure that the credit goes to the tireless work of the entire human rights community in the Philippines who started, made this process happen in the first place.
Janet: 11:44 When you talk about the war on drugs, which is what these crimes against humanity charges concern. I’ve provided a basic summary at the top of the podcast, but when you look at it from your perspective, how many people are we talking about? I’ve seen some very different numbers. How important a role has this played in Philippines politics? Can you kind of provide a bit more factual context for us to understand why this is still such a big issue?
Lian Buan: 12:13 Officially, it’s 27,000 to 30,000 people who died in only six years of the war on drugs. 7000 of the killings have been admitted to be done by the police executing anti-drug operations. The rest were killed by vigilantes. But just to paint the picture Janet, in 2016 we were all taken aback. We didn’t know what to do. There were so many people being killed every night. Newsrooms weren’t prepared. We didn’t know how to cover something that bloody. Even like the lawyers who I know, I’ve been covering them since forever, even lawyers whom I know, know what to do in times of killings, they also didn’t know what to do at that point. And these are bodies dropping dead in a very fast frequency than any of us can count. We ran out of reporters to send on the night shift. Our relationship with journalism changed even because we were used to a kind of journalism where if the authority says this happened, then it happened they were the source. But then we began distrusting the police narrative very early on. A guy was shot dead on the street. He saw a photo journalist, called on him, and so this photographer saw the dead body, and that guy did not die, did not end up being killed, and he lived to tell the story. So I don’t know if that makes sense, but reliving now the trauma of it all, I’m just trying to say how traumatic it was and how difficult it was for us to grapple with the magnitude.
Janet: 13:53 What are you going to be looking out for over the next few days? What’s in the back of your mind wondering? Are you going to wonder how he’s going to challenge this arrest in court? Are you wondering about his behavior when he gets to court? Are you wondering about where he’s going to be kept? Well, what are your big questions that you’re asking on behalf of your readers and viewers and listeners?
Lian Buan: 14:18 Actually, I asked this earlier. Is there a reason that he will be given an interim release by the ICC? How soon could he apply for an interim release? How soon could the judges decide on that interim release? Because, you know, this historic moment, I don’t know if the right word is celebrated, but people felt relieved that he got on that plane and sent to The Hague, and it sort of gave a validation to the work of human rights in the Philippines, a movement that he has demonized for years on end, and I would hate for it to be negated by an interim release. Like I know that an interim release doesn’t mean acquittal, but it will provide a new narrative to his supporters, who still dominate the online sphere. We know how our democracy could be subverted by online narratives. I was harassed yesterday by by the bloggers of supportive of Duterte. So I would hate for another, anything that could happen in The Hague that could provide a new narrative for Duterte and his legion of online supporters.
Janet: 15:32 Maybe there’s something you’d like to also share with us about the reactions that you’ve heard from some of the victim communities, some of the families of those who’d suffered in the drugs war.
Lian Buan: 15:43 Yeah, one of the mothers was asked earlier whether she had seen the Instagram stories of the daughter, Kitty Duterte. And she, Kitty Duterte kept posting that the rights of her father were violated. Her father was kidnapped. They put him on a plane, and we don’t know where he was going. And this mother, her name is Dahlia Cuartero, her son was killed by police in 2019, and she said, essentially, that at least your father is alive. And she said, you do not know how it feels to be looking for a dead son. That’s what she said, while crying. Another mother, Emily Soriano, she was asked what she feels about the statement that Duterte would be spending his 80th birthday alone in the ICC detention cell, because he would be celebrating his 80th birthday on March 28. And Emily Soriano, whose 16 year old son was killed, said, actually, I have the same birthday as Duterte. And so she said, as far as I’m concerned, my birthday wish is granted, which is to see Duterte in jail. And another one is that they said there’s, there’s no need to fear for Duterte safety in The Hague or in the ICC. We all want him alive, we all want to see him stand trial for the crimes they said he’s he’s committed against their loved ones.
Janet: 17:10 So thanks very much to Lian for all that. Now let’s turn to Stephanie van den Bergh. Stephanie, you’ve been a Reuters correspondent all day today, and now you’re finally turning back to your true love, to be doing a bit of podcasting, and you’ve been outside and inside the court. So what’s it been like for you? What’s been going on? Give us the spiel. What’s been, what’s been happening?
Stephanie: 17:33 The spiel is, of course, that I had to show up very early for this, even though Duterte himself was delayed in Dubai. But we set up all these interviews. So I met friend of the pod, Eva Vukošić, at nine on the steps of the ICC to interview her. We had something lined up with a lawyer for one of the victims that are there, and so we set up all these things. But as you maybe know from your journalist time, this is also a day of very long waiting and slight boredom. I was very happy today because I took a very nutritious lunch, which is handy, because we know that the ICC is in a kind of a dead zone for restaurants and snacks. But also I figured I could work from the ICC Press Center. And as you heard before, I was all alone in there nobody else, but at least I was nice and warm, and I felt bad for all the camera people who were getting frozen toes waiting outside.
Janet: 18:27 But as we’re recording now, you know, it’s the evening Hague time. Duterte is on his way to the detention center. What do you know?
Stephanie: 18:35 Well, about around four o’clock, between four and five, we saw the plane land. You know now, finally something is happening, but then it took a very long time for him to get out of the plane, and there was a helicopter and there was an ambulance, and they both left. And so if you have the relief of he’s here, that’s good. Now they’re going to transfer him to jail, and then it takes an hour for anything to happen. So there was more waiting and more like, what’s he doing, who’s in the car, that kind of thing. So it’s very, very kind of basic journalism. You become a bit of a gawker. I was sending a lot of messages, but what made it kind of exciting during the day was that we were watching this plane, and everybody knew the names, we were watching this on flight tracker, and we could see where he was, but we heard from colleagues in Manila that his kids had filed a habeas corpus petition at the Supreme Court in the Philippines. And so the question was, then, if the Supreme Court comes with a ruling that he has to go to court, are we going to see that plane kind of make a U turn in the sky? And we were all prepping for it, because you just don’t know. And he, you know, he wasn’t officially in custody of the tribunal, and I guess he was there with Philippine police in the plane. Who’s the pilot going to listen to? Are they going to return the plane? But in the end, all that prep was for nothing, because by the time he made it to German airspace, we had also heard that the Supreme Court is not going to be in time with any decision they make. So that shows that he’s going to be here.
Janet: 20:01 Why don’t we turn to some of the substance? Because, I mean, I’ve done a bit of that with Lian, as people have heard earlier, but not really from the ICCs point of view. I mean, you and I both got hold of the arrest warrant a little bit early. It was circulating on social media. You’re never sure whether it is the real one, but it was the real one. I must admit, going through it, maybe you want to pick out some points, but for me, I thought that it looked relatively slender. Arrest warrants don’t have to be very substantial. They don’t get arrested on a huge amount. But it didn’t have a lot of detail in it. But what would you like to pick out?
Stephanie: 20:39 No, I think that was interesting. It was slender. And they say that this war on drugs is a campaign that killed I think even the arrest warrant says that possibly 1000s were killed. But he is charged with only around or over 43 murders. And that seems like a small number compared to the numbers we know there are, but we also know that this prosecutor is kind of known for wanting to have ironclad cases and absolutely kind of slam dunk things that are easy to prove. So maybe he picked out, or they picked out these 40 emblematic cases that they knew were going to be incontestable, and then maybe they can build on that. What I also found remarkable in that indictment is that the prosecution had also asked for charges of rape and torture to be brought, and the judges had declined that. So that’s going to be interesting when we have this confirmation of charges hearing. You know, the ICC procedure is a little different. You don’t have an indictment, but you have charges that are mentioned in the arrest warrant, and then they have a special hearing where they kind of hammer out the indictment in this confirmation of charges, and I’m sure that the prosecution is going to try and get these other charges back.
Janet: 21:51 There’s a bit of a question for me as to how prepared the prosecution really is on this. I mean, we know that the whole court is under sanctions, but specifically the chief prosecutor, the main person, Karim Khan. We know that they’ve come out with loads of arrest warrants that have been made public for Israel, for Russia, on the Ukraine situation, on the Palestine situation. So there’s been tons and tons of work. We also know that the prosecutor’s facing allegations of sexual misconduct. Do we know that a load of work has been put into the Philippines investigation?
Stephanie: 22:30 Well, I don’t know what we can draw from this, but I was early in the court and waiting outside before I had that interview with Eva. So I went into the court with my pass to go to get a coffee, and was at the coffee bar in the court when I heard somebody congratulating somebody in front of me with the warrant, both of people I don’t know, so I can’t tell you who they were, but one of them was saying, Oh, congratulations, you know, this is such a surprise. And then the other one went, well, we worked really hard on it, and I was really happy that we had this whole case and now we have it. And he went, are you prepared? And yes, we really hammered it out before we sent it. So I thought…
Janet: Well, there we go, a horse’s mouth.
Stephanie: Well, I don’t know, because they could, I mean, this could have been the people talking about whether they had repainted the cell where Duterte might be staying, so I don’t know, but that, for me, caught my attention. And this is what I’ve heard, you know, talking to sources within the prosecutor’s office and that deal with Khan, even the people that maybe are not so happy about his way of leadership or have something to say about these sexual abuse allegations, they all say that he’s very precise and wants these indictments really hammered out, and is very detail oriented in that. So it doesn’t surprise me that they have this well prepared, and maybe they will keep it small. Maybe, I think probably, if you talk to the victims in the Philippines, the victims’ families who’ve worked really hard to get these cases in front of the ICC, they might be disappointed that it’s so limited in people, because that also means maybe that the victims and the reparations are only a very limited amount of people. But you know, also being with all these Filipino anti Duterte people at the court, the idea that he is in a court and he is going to have to answer for what he did, was really a relief for a lot of people. One of my colleagues is Filipino and came down from another country in Europe and volunteered to come and help us out, because he was, like, very happy to see Duterte, to actually be there when the former president was brought to the ICC.
Janet: 24:39 What are the issues and the bits and pieces you’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks? I can think of things like, when will the initial appearance be? Who the lawyer will be? What are the things you’re going to be mulling over?
Stephanie: 24:53 Well, of course, the initial appearance that usually happens within a couple of days, we’re going to see who the lawyer is. Duterte himself is a lawyer, but at the ICC, you cannot represent yourself, so he will have to have duty counsel at least. I don’t know if he has lawyers that are already on the list for ICC Council. There are Filipino lawyers who are just on the council list and who he could have brought with him, but maybe for the initial appearance, we will see one of the evergreen ICC council that we always see because they just get assigned a duty Council. As in, who pays that’s also going to have to be hammered out at the initial appearance in the sittings afterwards. I cannot imagine that he claims indigence, but I mean, we’ve seen it from other ICC suspects, so who knows, maybe everything is in his daughter’s name, or something like that.
Janet: 25:40 We mentioned earlier about daughters. I mean, a lot of the stuff that we knew about happening in the Philippines as he was being arrested, was being live streamed on Instagram. Do you think the court is prepared for the amount of media attention that in the Philippines, also kind of brought out by Duterte’s own supporters, is going to actually be happening?
Stephanie 26:02 I think so, because they also went through Kenya, and that was with a little less social media, but still, they know kind of what to expect, and they’ve had this attention before, and also…
Janet: …Well, that doesn’t bode very well, does it Steph?
Stephanie: 26:18 No Kenya and Ivory Coast was also a lot of vlogging and blogging, but it is absolutely true that when I arrived at the ICC this morning, there were camera crews, you know, as they always are. But there were also a lot of people just filming themselves and doing kind of live vlogging in front of the court, which always is funny to see.
Janet: 26:38 There was a comment by another friend of the pods, Sergey Vasiliev on social media, wondering whether Duterte could be like a ‘Šešelj’, which is, as far as I understand, the kind of defendant who kind of uses the court for grandstanding.I mean, this is more your area than mine – Šešelj.
Stephanie: 26:58 Well, Šešelj is the kind of the epitome and one of the worst excesses of that. So what I also understand from our colleagues in the Philippines, who’s written extensively, also about Duterte and the war on drugs and Reuters did a bunch of special reports and things like that, is that he is rather theatrical and happy to make big declarations. So if you’re talking about Šešelj, like, I mean, Šešelj was insulting the judges, was claiming that there were assassination plots against him. It was wild. And what I understand from Duterte, but this is what I’ve heard, is that, yeah, he is also prone to making a declaration. We always see these former strongmen end up in the court saying that they’ve done everything for their country, and so I don’t doubt for a second that he’s going to relish the attention, at least that this initial appearance gets, and that he will try to make his statement, and that they will not care so much about the court, or at least loudly proclaim the court is illegal or his arrest is unlawful or that he’s being mistreated. His daughter already sent pictures on Instagram that he only got a sandwich in the five hour flight from Dubai to here. So I’m afraid he’s going to be very, very upset with the Dutch lunch regime of cheese sandwiches that might be in the prison.
Janet: 28:18 He is a relatively old man, Lian mentioned that it’s his 80th birthday coming up this month. Are there concerns about his health? I think there was an ambulance there wasn’t there to greet him on the tarmac.
Stephanie: 28:32 Yes, there was an ambulance, and even an air ambulance, a trauma helicopter, but they both left. I think absolutely health is an issue, and apparently he has already health issues. I think we’ve seen also that Milosevic also had lots of health issues, and his lawyers played that up. I think you would not be a very successful defense lawyer if you showed up to defend an elderly suspect and not raise the issue of his age and his health problems, and trying to get to argue that he’s maybe unfit to stand trial. We’ve seen that a lot, but I will also remind you that we have this octogenarian Rwandan génocidaires who was deemed by the Residual Mechanism for the former Rwanda Tribunal to be unfit to stand trial, but they’re also not releasing him. So it’s actually quite rare for an international tribunal to release somebody or to declare somebody unfit for trial, even because of old age. The Scheveningen prison is also managing to keep Mladic alive, who’s had lots and lots of health issues. So these people do have access to the Dutch medical system. And I know some of our expat listeners in the Netherlands will laugh at that and say that they’re going to be sent home with a paracetamol, which may be a little true, but I mean, this is not a detention unit full of strapping young men. There are a lot of old, elderly suspects in the different international courts and tribunals, so they probably will know how to deal with that.
Janet: 30:01 And let’s just finish off. I know that you’ve, during today, you were interviewing other people as experts on the ICC, but why don’t we turn it back to you as the expert on the ICC, maybe I’ll join in as well, what do you think this arrest and potential trial to go ahead, actually what effect does it have on the institution and the way that it’s seen?
Stephanie: 30:29 I think it has a kind of invigorating effect, and it’s also what I heard from other people, but I saw it at the court today. Everybody kind of had a new spring in their step. Something was happening. They were getting this person that they didn’t think that it was going to get. This is something that makes the court relevant and credible, and it was facing empty courtrooms. It’s still dealing with all these sanctions. They are maybe going to impact this trial. But for the moment, I think everybody kind of also had a bit of a sigh of relief, like this is a light point. Here is something, after a couple of months with sanctions, with all the criticism for the Netanyahu warrants, the Libya Italy debacle, of not arresting the suspect. You know now this is all going the way it should, for now. The problem that we’re going to have, maybe, is that this is a kind of special case, because the Philippines had already left the ICC. And so there is maybe a question that needs to be fleshed out about the jurisdiction, and there might be a legal challenge that is going to be quite still an effort to take that hurdle. So if he gets delivered and then they can’t make it for the trial or he gets acquitted, then it could be really bad, and it could get bogged down in procedural difficulties, or if he is too old or too frail, if it’s going to be one of those trials where they can only sit a couple of days a week, and it’s going to get dragged out, then it’s probably going to be not good for the court again. But at the moment, everybody is kind of like, this is the way it’s supposed to go. We have somebody who universally agreed that this is not the greatest person, who maybe did some things that he should have accountability for. Local law enforcement, local courts are not doing that. We put out an arrest warrant. We have this investigation. They put him on a plane. He’s here, you know…
Janet: Let’s get on with it.
Stephanie: Let’s get on with it.
Janet: 32:25 Yeah, yeah, okay, let’s leave it there, and I’m sure we’ll be coming back to it as we hear more. I’m going to be back in The Hague in a couple of weeks, so please, let’s have some confirmation of charges hearing soon. I doubt it, but you know, that would be nice.
Stephanie: 32:41 Yeah, I think probably the jurisdictional challenges might be at that stage, so maybe we will have prolonged confirmation of charges hearings. Let’s see.
Janet: See you soon.
Stephanie: Bye.
[OUTRO TUNE]
This was asymmetrical haircuts, your international justice podcast, created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg in partnership with the Hague Humanity Hub. You can find show notes and everything about the podcast on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating and spread the word.
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using online transcribing software, and checked and supplemented by the Asymmetrical Haircuts team. Because of this we cannot guarantee it is completely error free. Please check the corresponding audio for any errors before quoting.
