Batas Mauricio WITH due respect, it was totally misleading for Sen. Leila de Lima and Chairman Luis Gascon of the Commission on Human Rights to raise the possibility that the International Criminal Court, or ICC, which is based in The Hague, Netherlands, could investigate the Philippines for the extrajudicial killings that have been happening in relation to the fierce anti-drugs campaign of President Duterte. I say it was misleading because, from the way de Lima and Gascon played out their “question and answer show” during the second day of the Senate inquiry into the extrajudicial killings on Tuesday, they tried hard to make it appear that the ICC can, at any moment, start investigating our country if the killings do not stop real soon. The clear objective of the two, of course, was to somehow scare or frighten Duterte and his government, particularly the Philippine National Police (PNP) and its chief, Director General Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, to go slow in their harsh campaign against illegal drugs and the killings that are associated with it. The question, however, is this: does the ICC have the power to readily jump in, as it were, into the ongoing killings in the Philippines and start an investigation preparatory to the filing of criminal cases before it? Does the ICC have the legal right to investigate what is happening in the anti-drugs campaing of the Duterte government? Based on the Rome Statute (or the multi-lateral treaty which serves as the ICC’s Constitution and which took effect in 2002), the ICC can only directly investigate anyone if the conditions for such direct investigation are present. Without these conditions, the ICC cannot simply meddle, in a manner of speaking, in the affairs of its member-countries lest it is accused of unlawful intervention. Art. 17 (1) (a) of the Rome Statute presents one important condition before the ICC can proceed with its investigation. It says: “the Court shall determine that a case is inadmissible where: (a) The case is being investigated or prosecuted by a State which has jurisdiction over it, unless the State is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution…” Without doubt, where the authorities of the country where the investigation is to be carried out are themselves already investigating an act or a series of act that maybe considered as a war crime, genocide, aggression, or, as de Lima and Gascon bruited about on Tuesday, a crime against humanity, the ICC cannot come in and do its own probing. And this is what is happening with the so-called extrajudicial killings in the Philippines right now. Many different agencies under the Duterte government are now carrying out their own investigations into these killings, notably the PNP, the Department of the Interior and Local Government, the Department of Justice, the CHR under Gascon and, of course, the Senate under de Lima. There is therefore no reason for ICC to do any investigation. It has no legal basis to come to the Philippines to look into the so-called extrajudicial killings here, because its own charter, the Rome Statute, forbids it from doing so. It is therefore the height of intellectual dishonesty for anyone to be claiming that the Philippines will be probed soon by the ICC. That simply is a factual and legal lie! E-mail: batasmauricio@yahoo.com