EDITORIAL OPINION
"A rule of law that applies only to your enemies is not a rule of law. It is a rule of convenience."
The following is an editorial opinion of the Breaking News Negros Oriental Editorial Board, published June 22, 2026. It does not represent the views of any individual reporter or staff member. Opinion pieces are labeled as such in accordance with Google News Publisher standards and MSN News editorial guidelines.
Fourteen Hours to The Hague — and Then a Handshake in Kazan
Consider two images, separated by roughly fifteen months, that together tell a story the Marcos administration has never satisfactorily explained. In the first, former president Rodrigo Duterte is taken from Manila's international airport on the morning of March 11, 2025, and placed aboard a private aircraft bound for the Netherlands — all within the span of a single working day. In the second, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. stands before cameras in Kazan, Russia, in June 2026, clasping the hand of Vladimir Putin and co-chairing a regional summit that closed with a five-year partnership roadmap.
The International Criminal Court is central to both images. It is the institution the Philippine government cited when justifying the extraordinary speed of Duterte's transfer. And it is the same institution that, on March 17, 2023, issued an arrest warrant for President Putin — charging him with the war crime of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children from occupied territories into Russia, according to ICC court records. That warrant has never been withdrawn. Putin remains a designated fugitive under international law.
These two facts, placed side by side, produce a contradiction the Marcos administration has yet to address publicly. This editorial board believes that contradiction deserves sustained and serious scrutiny.
The Surrender That Stunned a Slow-Moving System
The speed of the Duterte transfer was, by any honest accounting, remarkable. Philippine justice is not known for its velocity. Ordinary criminal proceedings in this country routinely consume a decade or more before reaching resolution. Defense attorneys for the former president had rushed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court — but Duterte was airborne before the Court could act, according to contemporaneous reports from major Philippine news organizations.
The government's legal justification rested on Republic Act 9851, the Philippines' domestic statute on international humanitarian law, and on the ICC's retained jurisdiction over crimes allegedly committed while the Philippines was still a Rome Statute member. Manila withdrew from the Rome Statute in 2019 — on Duterte's own initiative — but the administration argued that withdrawal does not extinguish accountability for conduct that predates it. The drug war over which Duterte presided resulted in at least 6,000 confirmed deaths in police operations alone, with human rights organizations placing the actual toll significantly higher, according to documentation gathered by groups including Human Rights Watch.
This editorial board does not dispute that accountability for mass killing is appropriate, necessary, and long overdue. The question we raise is not whether Duterte should face justice. The question is whether the government that delivered him to The Hague actually believes in the institution to which it delivered him.
The ASEAN–Russia Summit and What It Revealed
The Kazan summit of June 2026 was framed, officially, as an ASEAN–Russia Commemorative gathering convened under the Philippines' rotating ASEAN chairmanship. Marcos did not attend merely as a passive participant. He co-chaired the proceedings, stood beside Putin for official photographs, and offered public remarks praising a relationship grounded in what he described as "mutual respect" and the principle that "cooperation, not confrontation, is the surest path to peace." The summit produced the Kazan Declaration and a five-year roadmap deepening bilateral and multilateral ties between ASEAN member states and Russia.
The ICC's arrest warrant for Putin — the first ever issued against a sitting leader of a permanent UN Security Council member, as ICC records confirm — carries binding legal and political weight for the 125 states that remain party to the Rome Statute. The Philippines, having withdrawn in 2019, is not among them. The administration may therefore argue, with some technical legitimacy, that it bears no legal obligation to detain Putin. That argument, however, creates a problem the government has not resolved: you cannot simultaneously claim the ICC as the moral foundation for your most consequential foreign-policy act — the Duterte surrender — and then dismiss its warrants as irrelevant when they apply to someone sitting at your summit table.
A Precedent the Philippines Has Set Before
It is worth noting that the Philippines has, in the past, demonstrated the capacity for principled diplomatic restraint. During the apartheid era, Manila aligned with the international community in restricting ties with South Africa, judging that certain forms of state conduct were incompatible with normal bilateral relations. No formal treaty obligation compelled that position. It was a choice — a statement that some conduct places a government outside the boundaries of legitimate partnership.
No comparable position was adopted toward Kazan. The administration had options available to it. It could have sent a lower-ranking representative. It could have attended without co-chairing. It could have issued even a muted public statement acknowledging that its presence at a table shared with an ICC-designated war crimes suspect was a matter of diplomatic necessity rather than personal endorsement. According to analysts who track ASEAN diplomatic practice, the regional body has navigated far more sensitive terrain without requiring its chair to provide the personal imprimatur of a head-of-state handshake.
None of these options were exercised. The administration chose full, visible, photographed co-chairmanship — and said nothing publicly about the warrant in Putin's name.
The Pattern This Editorial Board Has Named
We have described this pattern as the Putin Dance: the selective deployment of international legal machinery against domestic political opponents, combined with an equally selective silence when that same machinery designates a foreign dignitary. The Marcos administration has pursued not only Duterte but also Senator Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa — the former Philippine National Police chief and ICC co-accused whose arrest warrant was unsealed in May 2026. The Supreme Court rejected dela Rosa's attempt to block his own detention, according to court records cited by Philippine legal reporters. The administration has been vigorous, even aggressive, in cooperating with ICC processes when those processes target figures associated with the Duterte political camp.
That vigor makes the Kazan embrace more conspicuous, not less. A government willing to move at the speed of fourteen hours when the target is a former domestic rival might reasonably be expected to register at least token discomfort when co-presiding with a man the same court has charged with war crimes. The silence is not a neutral position. Silence, in this context, is itself a statement.
What Consistency Would Actually Look Like
This editorial board is not arguing for an absolutist foreign policy that treats every ICC warrant as an insurmountable diplomatic obstacle. We recognize that trade relationships, energy supply chains, food security considerations, and the realities of operating within a multipolar world order all impose legitimate constraints on how governments conduct themselves abroad. Reasonable analysts — including those cited regularly by foreign affairs outlets such as Foreign Policy and Asia Times — acknowledge that sustained engagement with major powers often serves long-term national interests more effectively than symbolic isolation.
What we are arguing is simpler: a government cannot invoke the sanctity of international justice to justify one action and then set that same justice aside three summits later because the person named in the warrant is a more powerful and more useful partner. Principle, to mean anything, must be applied consistently. Either ICC warrants represent a serious and binding moral consideration for Philippine foreign policy, or they represent a convenient tool to be wielded against political enemies and shelved when inconvenient. They cannot, with any intellectual honesty, be both.
The legal ambiguities created by the 2019 withdrawal from the Rome Statute are real, and international lawyers continue to disagree on their precise scope. But legal complexity does not explain co-chairing a summit with a fugitive. That is a political decision. The Philippines had room to make a different one. It chose not to.
Accountability Must Be Institutional, Not Instrumental
Until the Marcos administration demonstrates that its commitment to international accountability applies uniformly — to adversaries and to summit partners, to the politically inconvenient and to the diplomatically valuable — the handshake in Kazan will remain what it plainly appears to be: not a principled engagement with global order, but a carefully choreographed pose. A performance of justice, rather than its exercise.
The test is not the arrest. The test is consistency. Manila has not yet passed it.
Source: Breaking News Negros Oriental (breakingnewsnegor.com), Editorial Board, June 22, 2026.