August 16, 2024 - What will the Philippine National Police (PNP) do with the three high-ranking officers who were named as suspects in the ongoing probe by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs?
The three are: Major General Romeo Caramat Jr., former chief of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) and currently the acting area commander of Luzon; retired colonel Edilberto Leonardo, identified in the document as former commissioner of the National Police Commission (the Napolcom’s website still lists him as a commissioner); Brig. Gen. Eleazar Matta, identified by the ICC as former PNP chief intelligence officer (He is currentlythe director of the PNP-Drug Enforcement Group.).
The three police officers were named, together with Sen. Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa and former PNP chief Oscar Albayalde, in a four-page confidential document dated July 3, sent through the Philippine Embassy in The Hague and released to the media on July 25 by former senator Antonio Trillanes IV, one of the earliest complainants to the ICC against Duterte’s brutal drug war.
The document said: “Under Article 54 (1) a of the Rome Statute, the [Office of the Prosecutor) is obliged to conduct investigations which cover all the facts and evidence. This includes providing individuals under suspicion of crimes to provide their version of the events. In this context, the OTP has reasonable grounds to believe that the following retired and serving members of the Philippine National Police have committed crimes within the jurisdiction of the OTP. “
This is the first official ICC list of suspects ever reported on the investigation into alleged crimes against humanity committed under Duterte’s war on drugs, in which at least 20,000 persons were killed, according to human rights groups. The PNP, however, admits to only 6,000 individuals killed during police operations.
It has been almost a month since the ICC sent the document to the DFA and we can imagine that it has been delivered to the “suspects.”
The inclusion of the three active officers undermines the “new face” of the campaign against illegal drugs that Marcos touted in his second State of the Nation Address in July 2023.
He said then: “Unscrupulous law enforcers and others involved in the highly nefarious drug trade have been exposed. I will be accepting their resignations. In their stead, we will install individuals with unquestionable integrity, and who will be effective and trustworthy in handling the task of eliminating this dreaded and corrosive social curse.”
As head of the PNP’s drug enforcement group, Matta supposedly leads a different anti-illegal drugs strategy that does not include extermination of suspects.
Leonardo is still with Napolcom, which exercises “administrative control and operational supervision over the PNP, with the end in view of ensuring a highly capable, effective and credible police service”
Why is Duterte not on the list? Trillanes explained that the former president was already named when the ICC authorized prosecutor Karim Khan to proceed with the probe on Sept.15, 2021.
The former senator further said the formal naming of the five former and current PNP officials in Duterte’s drug war probe puts them in the “blue notice” of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol).
Inclusion in the Interpol’s “blue notice” means that if and when the suspect travels outside the Philippines, he may be detained for questioning in connection with the ICC probe.
“They have a choice whether to cooperate or not,” Trillanes said.
Carramat, Leonardo and Matta still have that option.
There were earlier talks about Albayalde’s willingness to cooperate with the ICC but that turned out to be false. Dela Rosa, whose Facebook page showed him distributing foodstuff to victims of typhoon Carina on Thursday, shrugged off the ICC update: “"What's new? My name was always mentioned since 2016. Seems like a broken record that keeps on repeating the same lines,” he told VERA Files through text.
As for Duterte, an arrest warrant will just be a matter of time.
https://verafiles.org/articles/can-3-high-ranking-pnp-officials-get-out-of-icc-suspects-list
Ellen Tordesillas is trustee and writer of VERA Files (verafiles.org), a group that undertakes in-depth reporting on current issues and does Fact-checking to fight disinformation. She writes opinion columns which appear in Malaya Business Insight, ABS-CBN online and VERA Files. As a reporter, she has covered education and health and science, the PCGG and foreign affairs beat before she was assigned to cover politics. She has covered all Philippine elections since the 1986 snap elections that triggered the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos. She continues to watch closely anything relevant to the Filipino people.
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