Still nowhere to run
President Marcos reportedly summoned the French ambassador amid news that Zaldy Co has sought asylum in France. If the discussion strayed into the merits of an asylum claim, it edges into interference. Asylum is a sovereign, domestic process. It is not a bilateral negotiation, nor a diplomatic bargaining chip. States may exchange views, but they do not co-adjudicate protection claims over coffee in an embassy.
More plausibly, the administration is signaling resolve while casting a wide net for Co across Europe, in the wake of earlier information officials have disclosed—now clearly mistaken—that the former legislator holds a Portuguese passport, making him difficult to reach.
Optics aside, there remains a lawful pathway to secure his return, even with an asylum application pending. That pathway begins not with politics, but with law. Asylum proceedings are confidential.
Unlike arrest or detention, there is no automatic consular notification under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Manila may not even be formally informed of the filing. Jurisdiction, if the claim proceeds, will likely be allocated to France under the Dublin Regulation, which assigns responsibility to the first country of entry or one with relevant family links. This is an allocation regime, not a menu. Substantively, the claim confronts an exclusion filter.
The charges against Co arise from corruption. Under Article 44 of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC)—to which both the Philippines and France are parties—such offenses are expressly nonpolitical. The UNCAC goes further, framing corruption as a serious breach of UN principles and policies. That matters. It situates the case squarely within the category of legitimate prosecution, not persecution.
From there, the classic refugee grounds offer little traction. There is no credible showing that Co is targeted on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion—the standard grounds for a proper asylum application. Instead, he, along with several other top government officials, is facing charges in court because of alleged criminally corrupt conduct. The distinction is not semantic. It is the hinge on which refugee status turns. On these facts, recognition as a refugee is improbable.
The fallback is subsidiary protection anchored on non-refoulement, as reflected in the Refugee Convention and the European human rights framework. The principle simply means the right of an asylum seeker not to be sent back to one’s state of origin on a well-grounded fear of physical harm.
The threshold here is different but still exacting: a real, individualized risk of torture or execution upon return. Co’s public statements and purported threats may be invoked, but they are not self-proving. Assertions of fear, even dramatic ones, do not substitute for evidence.
Certainty requires a nexus between threat and source. That is where the claim strains. If Co seeks to ground risk on alleged exposure of high-level wrongdoing, he must demonstrate that exposure in a form that carries legal weight: a sworn, apostilled statement, supported by documentary and object evidence, and lodged before competent bodies such as the Sandiganbayan, the Office of the Ombudsman, or the Senate’s blue ribbon committee.
Without formal testimony against Mr. Marcos and former Speaker Martin Romualdez—the big names that he claimed are the real masterminds behind the flood control scandal—there is no credible evidence of a source of threat to his life and limb.
Without that step, the claim collapses into a generalized fear of prosecution, which does not meet the non-refoulement threshold. In short, the characterization of Co as a whistleblower is very much contestable.
This is precisely where the Philippine government can act, without trespassing on the adjudicative space of the asylum state.
Through diplomatic channels, it can furnish documentation demonstrating a consistent pattern: individuals implicated in comparable cases are prosecuted and detained, not assassinated. It can also establish that Co does not qualify as a whistleblower in any legally cognizable sense, having failed to submit sworn testimony identifying alleged masterminds.
If presented coherently and backed by records, such submissions undercut both limbs of the protection claim: they reaffirm the nonpolitical character of the charges under UNCAC and weaken any assertion of a real risk of serious harm.
The consequence is not immediate surrender, but it narrows the space for delay.
Asylum can certainly buy time. And Co knows it. But he cannot count on asylum to erase accountability. The governing framework—from Dublin allocation to the nonpolitical status of corruption and the strict evidentiary demands of non-refoulement—leaves little room for maneuver. The Philippine government must forthwith seize the initiative. For all the movement across borders and headlines, the legal map still points in one direction.
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Melissa Loja and Romel Bagares are independent Filipino scholars of international law
