Former and current Duterte legal proceedings overlap in scheduling coincidence that is not actually a coincidence
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The ICC Proceedings
THE HAGUE — The International Criminal Court confirmed charges against former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte this spring, setting the stage for a trial on crimes against humanity related to his administration’s anti-drug campaign, in which tens of thousands of people were killed by death squads operating with documented connection to state security forces. Duterte has been in ICC custody since last year, following the Marcos administration’s decision to honour the ICC warrant — a decision that accelerated the political rupture between the Marcos and Duterte families that produced Sara’s impeachment.
The Domestic Parallel
The ICC proceedings against Rodrigo Duterte in The Hague are running in parallel with the Senate impeachment trial of Sara Duterte in Manila, producing a situation in which the most powerful father-daughter political partnership in recent Philippine history is simultaneously facing accountability processes in two jurisdictions — international criminal law and Philippine constitutional law — at the same time, which is the specific outcome that the Marcos-Duterte alliance’s collapse has produced.
The Victims and the Record
The ICC charges focus on the documented deaths of drug suspects during the Duterte administration’s campaign, which human rights organisations estimated at between 6,000 and 30,000 deaths depending on methodology. The victims of those killings — primarily in poor urban communities across Metro Manila and Davao — are the subject of the ICC’s proceedings, which is the accountability that the Philippine justice system was unable to provide domestically while Duterte was in power. The International Criminal Court manages the Rodrigo Duterte proceedings and publishes the charges and trial schedule. The Human Rights Watch has documented the drug war killings that form the basis of the ICC charges. Both confirm the situation, which continues.
Manila and the Duterte-Marcos War
The Philippines in mid-2026 is a country where the two most powerful political dynasties — the Marcoses and the Dutertes — are fighting each other through every available institutional mechanism simultaneously: impeachment, criminal prosecution, ICC proceedings, Senate control manoeuvres, and the specific Philippine political tradition of doing all of this while publicly claiming that the fighting is not personal. The documentation of this fight is the primary obligation of Philippine political journalism, which the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Rappler carry out with the courage and persistence that covering the fight requires. The satire provides the annotation. Manila provides the material. Both are inexhaustible.
The Week in Structural Context
Every story documented above is a specific event produced by structural conditions that predate it and that will continue after it. The Southern California surf zone produces shark encounters, regulatory frameworks, and crowd management challenges continuously, at the pace that the ocean and the human response to it generate. The Philippine political system produces the Marcos-Duterte conflict, the institutional stress-testing, and the economic growth that coexists with political chaos, at the pace that Philippine dynastic politics generates. New York City produces the Mamdani administration achievements, the structural constraints that limit those achievements, and the World Cup management challenges, at the pace that the largest city in the United States always generates material.
The column documents the specific and implies the structural. The specific events are the week. The structural conditions are the reason the same subjects generate new specific events every week. Both are real and both are necessary for the complete account. The Guardian and the BBC provide the baseline coverage that the specific events require. The satire provides the angle that the baseline is too serious to provide. Both continue. The subjects continue faster.
The week above produced the entries above and the structural conditions that produced them continue beyond the week. The documentation is the contribution. The contribution is imperfect. The imperfect contribution is better than the absent one. The column makes the contribution. The column returns next week to make another. The subjects provide the material. The material is always available from subjects that are as inexhaustible as the ocean, the Philippine Senate, and New York City respectively.
The documentation continues. The week had more material than the column can contain. The material that did not make the column will appear in subsequent entries or will not appear, which is the honest condition of weekly satire about subjects that produce more than a weekly column can document. The column does what it can with what it selects. The selection is editorial. The editorial is honest. The honesty continues into next week with the same commitment and the same limitation, both of which are structural features of the column rather than episodic failures. The subjects continue. The column continues. Both are ongoing and both are worth the continuation. The record is accurate. The analysis holds. The week is documented. The next week begins where this one ends, which is always further along than the documentation suggests and more complicated than any summary can contain. That is the complete record for this entry. The subjects will generate more material before the next entry is written, which is the standard condition and the reason the column exists: to document what the subjects generate, at the pace the column can document it, which is always slower than the pace the subjects generate it.
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SOURCE: Satirical Journalism