When an executioner demands fair trial

Former president Rodrigo Duterte spent six years treating due process like a pesky fly to be swatted away whenever it got in the way of his bloody war on drugs. Human rights? Western nonsense. Fair trial? A waste of time. Evidence? Overrated. His brand of justice came fast, brutal, and final, delivered not in courtrooms but in dark alleys, outside shanties, and behind police precincts, often with a cardboard sign that read “Pusher ako, huwag tularan (I’m a pusher, do not follow my example).”

Now, as he is finally hauled before an actual court of law to account for his “crimes against humanity,” the man who dismissed legal procedures as bureaucratic red tape suddenly wants his case handled with care. His family and supporters cry for fairness, due process, and the rule of law—terms that were nothing more than punchlines during his term.

The irony is so thick you could pack it in a sachet and plant it as evidence.

Extrajudicial killings (EJKs) had their own kind of “process.” Here’s a reminder to those afflicted with selective amnesia: under Duterte’s war on drugs, “justice” was served in a matter of seconds. A gunshot to the head. A body found slumped on the pavement. No courtroom, no judge, no appeal. The only trial took place in the minds of police operatives and vigilantes who decided, right then and there who deserved to live or die.

Thousands never made it to a police station, let alone a courtroom. Those lucky enough to “only” be arrested often found themselves in overcrowded jails, waiting for trials that would never come. Others were given a chance to “surrender,” only to end up in body bags days later. The dead never got a chance to appeal their sentence. Their families never got to plead for mercy. Their guilt was assumed, their execution immediate.

But now, as Duterte is being investigated for the very crimes he once championed, his family and loyalists are suddenly quoting legal textbooks. Due process, they demand. The right to a fair trial, they insist. Human rights, they cry—concepts that, for years, were treated as mere obstacles to “real justice,” the kind dispensed with bullets instead of gavels.

It’s almost poetic. The man who built his reputation on killing the accused without trial now demands one for himself.

To be perfectly clear, Duterte is not being executed without trial. He is not being gunned down on a street corner. He is not being left in a ditch with a cardboard sign explaining his supposed crimes. He is being given a chance to argue his case before a panel of judges and not an armed officer who’d decide his fate in five seconds flat.

The worst thing that could happen to him? A prison sentence, not a bullet to the head. Compare that to the worst thing that happened to his victims.

And yet, amid all the serious implications of Duterte’s arrest for accusations of denying so many their right to live, his daughter Veronica made sure to highlight what was surely the “greatest hardship of all”: her father enduring an eight-hour flight with nothing but a sandwich to eat (Fake news, by the way, as a subsequent video showed him chowing down on rice, a platter of cut fruits, and other comestibles on board the Lear Jet taking him to The Hague). His EJK victims were never even given the chance to ask for a last meal, let alone complain about it.

Where were these cries for justice when farmers were being massacred in Negros? When Kian delos Santos, 17, begged for his life before being shot in the head? When former University of the Philippines student Carl Arnaiz was abducted, tortured, and executed? When Reina Mae Nasino was denied the right to grieve for her baby River?

Where were the legal experts then? Where was the outrage when the justice system was tossed aside in favor of state-sanctioned violence? And now that the very architect of these atrocities is being investigated through legal means, they clutch their pearls and wail that this is unfair?

Duterte once said, “If you destroy my country, I will kill you.” Now, he is being investigated—not executed, not disappeared in the night, not murdered without warning. Investigated. And somehow, this is what his supporters find unjust.

So, to those shedding tears over his arrest, calling it unjust, relax. Duterte is simply being held to the same standard he once scoffed at. Unlike his victims, he’ll face the court and live to hear its verdict.

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Ralph Revelar Sarza is a freelance journalist who writes as @walphs on Instagram.