Rodrigo Duterte

Rodrigo Duterte’s public record is dominated by coercive anti-crime policy and the institutions that enabled it. Before the presidency, Human Rights Watch documented a pattern of killings in Davao City attributed to a so-called death squad and reported evidence implicating local officials and police; Duterte, then the city’s long-serving mayor, publicly used violent language about criminals and denied directing a death squad. That history matters because it preceded the national anti-drug campaign he made central to his presidency.

After taking office in 2016, Duterte publicly urged police action against suspected drug offenders and repeatedly used rhetoric that encouraged killing. The United Nations Human Rights Office later described widespread and systematic killings of alleged drug suspects, arbitrary detention, vilification of dissent and persistent impunity. Official police figures and estimates by rights groups diverged, so this dossier does not collapse them into one total. The central documented point is narrower: state anti-drug operations and associated violence produced thousands of deaths, and international investigators treated the pattern as a serious human-rights crisis.

The campaign also affected institutions that challenged the government. Senator Leila de Lima, a leading critic who had investigated killings in Davao and the drug campaign, was arrested on drug-related charges on 24 February 2017. Human Rights Watch called the prosecution politically motivated. She remained detained for years and was eventually cleared of the final narcotics case in 2024. Her treatment became a test of whether prosecution could be used to punish an elected critic.

Media pressure followed a similar pattern. Duterte repeatedly threatened ABS-CBN, one of the country’s largest broadcasters, and lawmakers rejected its franchise renewal on 10 July 2020 after regulators had already forced it off air. Rappler and its co-founder Maria Ressa faced a succession of legal and regulatory cases while reporting aggressively on the anti-drug campaign. These cases cannot all be reduced to a single presidential order, but together they show why press freedom and institutional independence are necessary parts of an accountability assessment.

Duterte also signed the Anti-Terrorism Act on 3 July 2020. Rights groups warned that its broad definitions and expanded powers could be used against critics and activists, especially in an environment where red-tagging already exposed people to harassment and violence. The law therefore belongs in the same record as the more visible killings: it changed the legal environment in which dissent and security policy interacted.

International accountability became a separate conflict. The Philippines notified the United Nations of its withdrawal from the Rome Statute in 2018, and the withdrawal took effect on 17 March 2019. The International Criminal Court maintained jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed while the Philippines was a state party. The Court authorised an investigation in September 2021 and allowed it to resume in January 2023 after a period of deferral. Duterte was arrested in the Philippines and surrendered to ICC custody in March 2025. On 23 April 2026, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber confirmed three charges of crimes against humanity of murder and attempted murder and committed him to trial. The case is at the trial stage; confirmation of charges is not a conviction.

The record is not exclusively negative. Duterte signed the Universal Health Care Act in 2019, an important expansion of the statutory basis for health coverage. That credit does not cancel the separate evidence on killings, detention, pressure on media or constraints on civic life; each act must be assessed through its own documented consequences.

The strongest criticism is therefore not that every abuse in the Philippines can be personally attributed to Duterte. It is that he made lethal anti-drug enforcement a presidential project, used public language that normalised killing, attacked or threatened important critics and media institutions, signed a security law that widened state power, and fought international scrutiny of the campaign. Attribution should remain specific to each event, but the cumulative pattern is sufficiently documented to treat repression, rule-of-law damage and civic restrictions as central to his presidency.