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The former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has been taken into custody after the international criminal court issued a warrant for his arrest for his so-called “war on drugs”.
The former leader, who will turn 80 this month, is accused by ICC prosecutors of crimes against humanity over his anti-drugs crackdowns, in which as many as 30,000 people were killed. Most of the victims were men in poor, urban areas, who were gunned down in the streets.
The president’s office said Duterte was arrested on Tuesday morning at Manila airport after flying back from Hong Kong.
“Early in the morning, Interpol Manila received the official copy of the warrant of the arrest from the ICC,” the presidential palace said in a statement. “As of now, he is under the custody of authorities.”
A video shared by the broadcaster GMA appeared to show Duterte as he was stopped on board a plane. “You will just have to kill me. I won’t allow you to take the side of the white foreigners,” he said.
Duterte, who remains an influential figure in Philippine politics, had previously responded to recent speculation that an arrest warrant was imminent, saying on Sunday: “If this is really my fate in life, that’s OK, I will accept it. There’s nothing we can do.”
Duterte became president in 2016 after promising a merciless, bloody crackdown that would rid the country of drugs. On the campaign trail he once said that there would be so many bodies dumped in Manila Bay that fish would grow fat from feeding on them. After taking office, he publicly stated that he would kill suspected drug dealers and urged the public to kill addicts.
Since his election, between 12,000 and 30,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed in connection with anti-drugs operations, according to data cited by the ICC.
Even as his crackdowns provoked international horror, he remained highly popular at home throughout his presidency. His daughter Sara Duterte is the current vice-president.
Police reports often sought to justify killings saying that officers had acted in self-defence, despite eye witnesses stating otherwise. Rights groups documenting the crackdowns allege that the police routinely planted evidence, including guns, spent ammunition and drugs. An independent forensic pathologist investigating the killings has also uncovered serious irregularities in how postmortems were performed, including multiple death certificates that wrongly attributed fatalities to natural causes.
Duterte, who appeared before a senate inquiry into the drugs war killings in 2024, said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for his policies, saying “I did what I had to do, and whether you believe it or not, I did it for my country.” During the same hearing, he told senators that he had ordered officers to encourage criminals to fight back and resist arrest, so that police could then justify killing them – but also denied authorising police to kill suspects.
Duterte also told the hearing that he kept a “death squad” of criminals to kill other criminals while serving as a mayor of Davao, prior to becoming president.
Duterte’s former legal counsel Salvador Panelo said the arrest on Tuesday was unlawful, and said the police had prevented one of his lawyers from meeting Duterte at the airport.
The ICC’s investigation into the anti-drugs killings covers alleged crimes committed from November 2011 to June 2016, including extrajudicial killings in Davao City,as well as across the country during his presidency up until 16 March 16 2019, when the Philippines withdrew from the court.
Human rights groups welcomed his arrest as a major breakthrough for families whose loved ones were killed. Human Rights Watch called it “a critical step for accountability in the Philippines” that “could bring victims and their families closer to justice”, and called on the government of President Ferdinand Marcos to swiftly surrender him to the ICC.
Marcos – who took office in 2022 after a joint campaign with Duterte’s daughter, Sara – initially said he would not cooperate with the ICC, calling its investigation an “intrusion into our internal matters”. However relations between the two families have soured, and they are now embroiled in a high stakes struggle for power ahead of midterm elections. The Marcos administration later said it would cooperate if the ICC asked international police to take Duterte into custody.
This is a developing story …
