Monday, October 6, 2025

Will Trump be tried for murdering drug traffickers like former Philippine president Duterte is being tried?

 

... Duterte was arrested in March by Philippine authorities on a warrant issued by the ICC. He is now being held at an ICC facility in the Netherlands.

Supporters of Duterte criticized the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's political rival, for arresting and surrendering the former leader to a court whose jurisdiction his supporters dispute. ...

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I suppose it depends on a future president giving Trump up to arrest by the International Criminal Court somehow.

... The strikes on Venezuelan narcoterror smuggling boats provide one possible avenue. Shortly after the U.S. Navy destroyed the first such vessel, Ken Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch, endorsed ICC intervention. “Trump just did what the International Criminal Court has charged former Philippines Pres. Duterte with doing—ordering the summary execution of alleged drug traffickers,” Mr. Roth tweeted. Venezuela is a Rome Statute party, which in the court’s thinking gives it jurisdiction over U.S. officials and servicemen involved in the attacks. The ICC has already launched an investigation against a nonmember state (Israel) based on a single boarding of a vessel flagged by a member state, so it has all the precedents it needs.

Mr. Trump has thus far taken an incremental approach to the ICC. He revived a first-term executive order authorizing sanctions against the court and applied it against four ICC officials. None of this has significantly reduced the risk to the U.S. or led the ICC to change its ways.

The ICC’s supporters don’t see the existing sanctions as an “existential threat.” The tribunal can easily ride it out by lying low until a Democratic president lifts the sanctions, as Joe Biden did. The court takes a long view—its prosecutors and judges have nine-year terms, and its other staffers are part of a global deep state who can expect to remain at their jobs indefinitely.

International lawyers are already developing multiple lines of attack against the administration and its officials. ...

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