The defense team of former President Rodrigo Duterte asked the International Criminal Court to direct the prosecution to trim its evidence list, after it increased 978 percent despite the court requesting a tight case record.
The defense said that from 5,275, the items of evidence from the prosecution grew to 62,130, but a cursory check showed that many of these had little relevance to the crimes against humanity charges.
Aside from the massive numbers, it said the quality of the material was “abysmal” due to incorrect descriptions, dates and other metadata; floating pages detached from the source; and untranslated and/or untranscribed audio and video files.
“Proceeding to trial on this basis would undermine the efficiency of proceedings and, by consequence, Mr Duterte’s right to trial without undue delay,” it said in its motion filed by lead defense counsel Peter Haynes.
It also said it cannot possibly review all the materials submitted by the prosecution by October 30, the deadline for filing its Pre-Trial brief, or by November 30, the start of the trial.
For the defense to have time to review all the materials, Duterte’s trial would have to be moved to a later date, it said.
But as an alternative remedy, it asked that the prosecution be ordered to triage and properly organize the documents in its possession and to keep only relevant items, to be migrated to a new case record containing all exculpatory evidence and duly-reviewed and triaged Rule 77 and incriminating evidence.
These should be limited to no more than 10,000 items, it said.
“Accepting the status quo would be calamitous. The current case record is too big and too replete with metadata errors for the parties and the Chamber effectively to navigate and manage it,” it said.