Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte gained global notoriety for his deadly war on drugs, which has led to his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity, despite widespread domestic support.
A profane and populist figure who openly boasted of killings, Duterte’s anti-crime campaign resulted in the deaths of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users. Rights groups say many victims were poor men, often with no evidence linking them to drugs.
While his actions drew international condemnation, tens of millions of Filipinos endorsed his rapid approach to law and order, even as he made controversial jokes about rape in speeches, imprisoned critics, and failed to tackle entrenched corruption.
Public trust was further eroded by the coronavirus pandemic, which triggered the country’s worst economic crisis in decades, claiming tens of thousands of lives and leaving millions unemployed amid a slow vaccine rollout.
Duterte’s legal troubles intensified in 2021, when the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court sought an investigation into crimes against humanity linked to his crackdown between 2013 and 2018. He completed his six-year term, leaving office in 2022.
On 11 March 2025, just weeks before his 80th birthday, Duterte was arrested and flown to the Netherlands, the seat of the ICC, where he has remained in detention. He turns 81 next month and maintains that no official campaign existed to kill addicts and dealers, though his speeches included calls for violence, and he instructed police to use lethal force if threatened.
Kill them
“If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful,” Duterte said hours after taking office in June 2016.
Months later, he compared his deadly campaign to the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews, vastly underestimating Holocaust deaths.
“Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now there are three million drug addicts [in the Philippines]. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”
Such remarks were part of his self-styled image as a maverick, resonating in a country long plagued by corruption, bureaucratic delays, and institutional dysfunction.
Despite being barred from running for president again and currently detained, Duterte remains politically influential. He was elected mayor of his southern stronghold of Davao in midterm elections last May, though incarceration prevented him from taking office.
Once allied with the Marcos family, Duterte and his daughter and vice president, Sara Duterte, are now in a political feud with current President Ferdinand Marcos.
I simply love Xi
Born into a political family, Duterte is a former lawyer and prosecutor whose father served as a cabinet secretary prior to the 1972 Marcos dictatorship.
During his long tenure as Davao mayor, he faced accusations of ties to vigilante death squads that rights groups say killed more than 1,000 people — claims he has both accepted and denied, and which form part of the ICC charges.
His presidency also marked a pivot away from the United States towards China.
“I simply love Xi Jinping. He understands my problem and is willing to help, so I would say, 'Thank you, China’,” Duterte said in 2018.
He prioritised Chinese business interests over disputes in the resource-rich South China Sea and claimed this relationship helped secure millions of doses of Chinese-made Covid-19 vaccines, although deliveries fell far short. Promised trade and investment also largely failed to materialise.
Duterte faces his second court hearing on Monday, when judges will decide whether the prosecution’s allegations warrant proceeding to trial.
