Philippine bishops see hope for justice in Duterte arrest

'For years Duterte has claimed that he is ready to face the consequences of his actions. Now is the time for him to prove it,' the country's bishops say.

Church leaders seeking justice for families of up to 30,000 victims of summary execution in the Philippines welcomed the arrest this week of former president Rodrigo Duterte.

Rodrigo Duterte at the Malacañan Palace, the official residence of the president of the Philippines, on Sept. 11, 2018. Public Domain.

Duterte, who led the Catholic-majority country from 2016 to 2022, was detained March 11 at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila for alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated during his flagship “war on drugs” and in his prior post as mayor of Davao City.

Current Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., said Duterte’s arrest was based on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for crimes allegedly committed between 2011 and 2019.

Close to midnight on the day of his arrest, Duterte was taken by plane to the Netherlands, where he is due to face an initial ICC hearing.

On March 12, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said that Duterte was alleged to be criminally responsible for the crime against humanity of murder committed in the Philippines over an almost eight-year period.

“Mr. Duterte is alleged to have committed these crimes as part of a widespread and systematic attack directed against the civilian population,” said Khan, adding that Duterte was presumed innocent.

Duterte has long denied accusations of wrongdoing, though he has at least once admitted he was behind extrajudicial killings. That was one of his many statements that officials walked back, arguing it had been made in jest.

But at a Senate hearing in October 2024, he said he accepted “full legal responsibility” for the war on drugs.

Members of different Christian communities have been providing family members of drug war victims with pastoral care and assistance in seeking justice. Human rights activists believe that thousands of innocent Filipinos, including children, were killed by police and other gunmen amid what Duterte presented as a crackdown on crime.

For the Philippines’ Catholic bishops, who clashed frequently with Duterte over the conduct of the drug war, the former president must be held accountable for the killings.

In a statement following Duterte’s arrest, Bishop Jose Colin Bagaforo of Kidapawan said: “For years, former President Duterte has claimed that he is ready to face the consequences of his actions. Now is the time for him to prove it.”

Bagaforo, who chairs the Filipino bishops’ commission on social action, justice, and peace, said: “True justice is not about political allegiance or personal loyalty — it is about accountability, transparency, and the protection of human dignity. We urge Duterte to uphold his own words and submit himself to the legal process.”

Duterte isn’t uniformly hostile toward the Church’s leadership. He once spoke of his esteem for former bishops’ conference president Archbishop Oscar Cruz, a tireless crusader against gambling who died in 2020. He also paid his final respects to former Cebu archbishop Cardinal Ricardo Vidal and Davao Archbishop Fernando Capalla after their deaths.

But Duterte claimed in 2018 that his violent strategies against crime drew on his boyhood experience of being sexually abused in the confessional by an American Jesuit priest who had been banished from China after communists rose to power.

Speaking about this experience as a mayor and presidential candidate in 2015, Duterte said he remained Catholic and had forgiven the alleged perpetrator, who was long dead.

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Other bishops speaking out included San Carlos Bishop Gerardo Alminaza, who noted that the killings investigated by the international tribunal “were not random; they were part of a policy that violated the fundamental right to life.”

Victims’ families, Alminaza said, deserved truth, justice, and reparations. He added that measures must be taken to prevent a recurrence of the crimes.

The bishops released their statements while Duterte’s children and political allies, including Vice President Sara Duterte, claimed that the arrest was an illegal assault on Philippine sovereignty, amounting to kidnapping, that should be met with street protests.

Angry Duterte supporters converged outside of the military air base where the former head of state was temporarily detained. Rumors, later debunked, swirled on the internet that Supreme Court justices had intervened to halt the arrest.

Meanwhile, victims’ relatives lit candles and prayed inside a Manila Catholic church.

Bishop Bagaforo and Bishop Alminaza urged Duterte’s supporters not to compromise the rule of law, encouraging them to prioritize the common good over partisan interests as his prosecution proceeds.

Other Christian communities also welcomed Duterte’s arrest.

Filipino Methodists, who belong to a coalition called Rise Up for Life and for Rights that has sought to hold Duterte liable for drug war deaths, expressed solidarity with victims’ relatives as he was taken into custody.

Young people affiliated with the largest group of Filipino Evangelical churches, the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, also offered their support to victims.

The Evangelical Society of Christian Youth in the Philippines responded to the arrest with a prayer composed in Tagalog.

It read, in part: “O God of justice, you render judgment on those who sow sorrow and darkness: The power that brings death shall oppress only for a time. The power that oppresses, the hand that kills, the heart that does not fear bloodshed shall be cast down by upright verdict. We pray that each drop of blood that has fallen may be paid for with justice.”

“Hear the voices of your children — mothers, fathers, parents, sons and daughters, couples, brothers and sisters, friends, and colleagues — hearts in pain and want. In the nation that has taken a stand and resisted, they have witnessed the light of justice — the light that has begun conquering the night of being downtrodden.”

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The handing over of Duterte to the ICC highlights years of struggle for redress on behalf of victims by Filipino churches, media, activists, academics, and lawyers — groups he repeatedly targeted in tirades as he consolidated power during his presidential tenure from 2016 to 2022.

Those years were marked by, among other events, Duterte’s withdrawal of the Philippines from the Rome Statute, the treaty governing states’ participation in the ICC. He took the decision after ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced a “preliminary examination” of the drug war in 2018.

Although the Supreme Court of the Philippines could not remedy what lawmakers deemed an invalid withdrawal, it acknowledged that, under the statute, Filipinos under investigation remained accountable to the international tribunal until the state’s withdrawal officially took effect.

Still, Duterte persecuted his critics, including religious leaders, who objected to his policies, engaging frequently in expletive-laden outbursts. On one occasion, he called God “stupid” and spoke dismissively about the saints.

A request by the bishops for dialogue in 2018 apparently came to no clear resolution. With Davao Archbishop Romulo Valles at the helm of the bishops’ conference, Church leaders declared a three-day period of national reparation for blasphemy.

Later that year, Duterte called for bishops to be robbed and killed, while calling them children of prostitutes who were mostly homosexual. He took back what he said only in 2019, after he learned from then Manila Archbishop Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle that Bishop Pablo Virgilio David and other priests received death threats in text messages from a person who claimed to be a member of the president’s family.

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Fr. Flaviano Villanueva, a Filipino member of the Society of the Divine Word, served as a counselor and spiritual companion to those bereaved by the drug war. During investigations in the country’s Senate, he testified about the suffering of drug war victims’ families and underscored the importance of giving a second chance through rehabilitation to people struggling with substance abuse.

Villanueva attracted media coverage for going beyond the usual priestly duties. He helped to expose the extent of drug war atrocities by turning over, with permission of family members, remains of victims to a forensic doctor for autopsies.

The action was part of Villanueva’s Project Paghilom (Project Healing), a program launched in 2017 to help widows, orphans, family members, and communities of extrajudicial killing victims to rebuild their lives. Services for beneficiaries include food provision and health analysis, grief counseling, legal, educational, and livelihood assistance, and help with the burial of victims’ remains.

Villanueva was highly critical of the Duterte administration as the bodies of alleged drug users and pushers piled up across the Philippines.

The priest also reportedly crafted a program to protect former members of a death squad allegedly overseen by Duterte, encouraging them to voluntarily testify against their ex-leader.

The Duterte government formally accused Villanueva in 2020 of conspiring to commit sedition. He was not the only person to face the charge. Similar accusations were also leveled against another Jesuit, Fr. Alberto Alejo, a professor of anthropology at the Pontifical Gregorian University and faculty member of the Ateneo de Manila University.

Alejo co-authored an academic paper arguing that “the truth-telling of two former death squad members is a strong indictment of extrajudicial killings and the militaristic connotation of the term ‘war on drugs’ with the subsequent violation of the dignity and security of the weak.”

Others who suffered legal harassment included Archbishop Socrates Villegas of Lingayen-Dagupan, Bishop Honesto Ongtioco of Cubao, the now Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, and Auxiliary Bishop Teodoro Bacani Jr. of Novaliches.

In 2017, the-then president of the Filipino bishops’ conference Archbishop Villegas led the episcopate in registering concern about the drug war, insisting that the right to due process must not be set aside in the pursuit of peace and order.

“This traffic in illegal drugs needs to be stopped and overcome,” he said in a pastoral letter. “But the solution does not lie in the killing of suspected drug users and pushers. We are concerned not only for those who have been killed. The situation of the families of those killed is also cause for concern. Their lives have only become worse.”

“An additional cause of concern is the reign of terror in many places of the poor. Many are killed not because of drugs. Those who kill them are not brought to account. An even greater cause of concern is the indifference of many to this kind of wrong. It is considered as normal, and, even worse, something that (according to them) needs to be done.”

Bishop Ongtioco directed all parishes in his diocese to ring church bells for five minutes at 8 p.m. each day on Aug. 22-29, 2017, as an expression of support for victims’ families.

“Let the ringing of bells also signify the diocese’s strongest condemnation to the continuation of these killings which is being justified as necessary in the war against drugs,” he said.

Cardinal David published in 2018 what was perhaps the strongest condemnation of the drug war.

An op-ed entitled “Prophetic Oracle against Murderers” was circulated on the death anniversary of Kian de los Santos, a 17-year-old student who was framed, blindfolded, dragged away, and shot dead by police, becoming the face of innocents slaughtered during the drug campaign.

David, who received the red hat in December 2024, wrote: “Woe to you who claim to be waging a war against illegal drugs but are killing its victims instead of saving them! You who order law enforcers to murder when their mandate is to protect the citizens and defend their right to a safe and secure environment.”

“Woe to you who blindly follow unjust and unlawful orders! You who blindly obey the command to ‘kill drug suspects if they resist arrest!’ Woe to you who plant evidence in order to justify murder!”

Bishop Bacani had expressed his sadness at the killings and his prayer that God would move perpetrators’ consciences to repent. But he added that “they must be punished and disciplined; we must not just acquiesce to their actions.”

Duterte responded by calling Bacani, one of the framers of the 1987 Philippine Constitution, the son of a whore. He also claimed the bishop was a monkey who had two wives.

The bishops — together with activist priest Fr. Robert Reyes and the present superior general of the Lasallian Brothers, Br. Armin Luistro — were charged in 2019 with various violations, including libel and inciting sedition.

They were alleged to have conspired to circulate videos accusing the then-presidential family of involvement in the illegal drugs trade, in a plot to overthrow the Duterte government. In 2020, prosecutors dropped the charges against the six for lack of evidence. In 2023, Villanueva and Alejo were acquitted due to insufficient evidence.

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As the former president awaited transfer to The Hague, the Conference of Major Superiors in the Philippines urged the government, Duterte, and those who collaborated with him in the war on drugs to face the ICC process.

The religious superiors called the arrest a crucial step toward addressing the countless human rights violations committed under Duterte’s administration, particularly the brutal war on drugs that claimed thousands of innocent lives.

They emphasized that for years, victims’ families, human rights defenders, and faith-based organizations had sought justice for extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and other abuses, mostly targeting the poor and marginalized.

They said: “True peace can only emerge when past wrongs are acknowledged, and those responsible are held to account. Duterte’s ICC warrant is not just a legal matter — it is a moral call for justice and truth.”

“Accountability is essential for healing and transformation. Justice must not be selective, and impunity must not be allowed to reign. Those who enabled and carried out injustices must also be called to responsibility.”

“We call on the Philippine government to fully cooperate with the ICC’s investigation and arrest orders. Justice must not be obstructed, and Duterte, along with those who enforced and enabled his reign of terror, must face the consequences of their actions. This is not about vengeance but about upholding the dignity of every person, especially the poor and vulnerable.”

“As we move forward,” the superiors concluded, “let us remain vigilant and committed to the path of truth, justice, and reconciliation. The struggle for a just and peaceful society continues.”