The Common Legal Representatives of Victims (CLRV) have asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) Trial Chamber III to reject former President Rodrigo Duterte’s legal team’s bid to have the prosecution re-file the charges against him over his administration’s bloody war on drugs.
In their submission, the victims’ representatives said the charges had already been confirmed by the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber during the confirmation proceedings and that Duterte’s defense was merely trying to reopen issues that had already been settled.
The CLRV said the Pre-Trial Chamber had confirmed all the charges against Duterte and committed him to trial in its April 23, 2026 decision.
They said the defense had previously raised substantially the same objections when it sought permission to appeal the confirmation of charges, but the Pre-Trial Chamber rejected the request.
“The Defence Motion should be dismissed in limine,” the CLRV said as it argued that the defense was effectively challenging how the Pre-Trial Chamber delineated and confirmed the charges.
The victims’ representatives said the charges now defining Duterte’s case are those confirmed by the Pre-Trial Chamber together with the facts and circumstances outlined in its Confirmation Decision.
They also said the Pre-Trial Chamber had found that the charges had a clear temporal, geographical and material scope.
The CLRV further argued that the defense could not use Rule 134(1) as another avenue to seek a review of the Pre-Trial Chamber’s decision after it had failed to obtain leave to appeal.
The victims’ representatives also defended the use of non-exhaustive and illustrative incidents in the charges, saying this was justified by the scale and nature of the alleged criminality.
They noted that Duterte allegedly held institutional positions as vice mayor and mayor of Davao City and later as president that placed him at a significant distance from the physical commission of the alleged crimes and corresponding to the modes of liability alleged against him, including indirect co-perpetration.
Importantly, the CLRV said the Pre-Trial Chamber had already found, at the applicable confirmation standard, that the alleged murders and attempted murders formed part of a widespread and systematic attack carried out pursuant to a policy to “neutralise” alleged criminals.
The Pre-Trial Chamber also found that the individual acts charged as incidents formed part of that alleged attack, the victims’ representatives said.
The CLRV maintained that the non-exhaustive nature of the incidents did not make the charges open-ended or indeterminate because the Confirmation Decision had already established their temporal, geographical and material parameters.
They also argued that requiring an exhaustive list of every alleged incident could artificially narrow the case and exclude victims whose experiences fall within the charged conduct simply because their individual incidents were not included in the original list.
The CLRV asked Trial Chamber III to dismiss the Duterte defense motion outright or, alternatively, reject it on the merits.#