The Court refused to be a sanctuary for impunity

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

There is a particular kind of legal argument that mistakes the dress for the person. It clothes itself in the language of rights — constitutional rights, due process, the sacred writ of liberty — and presents itself as the noblest of causes: a man defending his freedoms against an overreaching state. It is eloquent. It is passionate. And when it appears before a court, it demands to be taken seriously.

The Supreme Court took it seriously. And then it said no.

In denying Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa’s application for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and Status Quo Ante Order (SQAO) against enforcement of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, the Court’s majority — including four justices who wrote separate concurring opinions — reached a verdict that is as legally precise as it is morally urgent. The four concurring justices — Caguioa, Leonen, Singh, and Zalameda — arrived at that verdict through different doctrinal paths. But their destination was the same: a court of law cannot become a sanctuary for impunity.

Understanding why requires us to look not just at the legal arguments but at the deeper questions those arguments raise — about what due process really means, about what a constitution is really for, and about what happens when the people killed never got a chance to ask for protection.

What was Dela Rosa actually asking for?

To understand the concurring justices’ responses, we need to understand precisely what Dela Rosa sought. He did not ask the Court to rule that the ICC had no jurisdiction over him. He did not ask the Court to decide whether the Philippines’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute extinguished the ICC’s power to investigate acts committed while the Philippines was still a member. Those are the real questions — the ones the Court will eventually have to answer.

What he asked for was emergency relief: a temporary restraining order that would prevent anyone from acting on the ICC arrest warrant against him, and a Status Quo Ante Order that would freeze the legal situation as it was before the warrant was issued. He wanted, in essence, a pause — protection from legal process while the bigger questions are being litigated.

Sounds reasonable. Except for a few details.

For approximately six months before filing his petition, Dela Rosa had been outside the Philippines, effectively beyond the reach of any process that might be served on him. He returned — not to face the legal proceedings, but to vote in a Senate leadership election. Having cast his vote and secured his preferred political outcome, he then walked into the Supreme Court and asked for protection from the very process he had spent six months evading.

This is not a technicality. This is the foundation upon which the entire case against granting relief was built.

Four justices, four perspectives, one conclusion

Justice Alfredo Benjamin S. Caguioa: The dead are not rhetorical devices

Justice Caguioa writes with the kind of clarity that comes from having thought through the human stakes of a legal argument. His concurrence opens with what he sees as the unavoidable reality: the Court has previously taken judicial notice — in Almora v. Dela Rosa — of 20,322 deaths in the drug war under Dela Rosa’s tenure as PNP Chief. That is 40 people per day. Every day. For months.

None of those 20,322 people got to invoke the Constitution. None of them got to file a petition. None of them had a lawyer who could stand before the Supreme Court and argue for their rights. They are, in Justice Leonen’s phrase, the “voiceless dead.”

Now the man at the head of the operation that produced those deaths asks the Supreme Court to protect his constitutional rights. And the argument on his behalf is essentially: due process demands it.

Justice Caguioa does not dispute the importance of due process. He insists on it — for everyone. Citing People v. Webb and Merciales v. Court of Appeals, he reaffirms a principle that Philippine jurisprudence has long recognized but which is often forgotten when a powerful person is in the dock: due process is not a monopoly of the defense. It is a right of the victims too. It is the right of families to have their loved ones’ deaths investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted. It is the right of the public to know that the state is accountable for what is done in its name.

“To frame the issues in any other way,” Caguioa writes, “is to insult the dead.”

He then applies what legal scholars call the fugitive disentitlement doctrine — a principle most recently affirmed by the Supreme Court itself in Vallacar Transit, Inc. v. Yanson, Jr. (G.R. No. 259337, November 25, 2025). The doctrine is rooted in fairness: a person who escapes legal process cannot simultaneously ask the courts to protect him from that process. You cannot flee from the law and then run to the law for shelter.

Dela Rosa spent six months outside the country, out of reach. He came back for a Senate vote. Then he went to the Supreme Court for a TRO. The sequence is not coincidental — it reveals a man treating legal process as an inconvenience to be managed on his own schedule, rather than an obligation to be met on the law’s terms.

The fugitive disentitlement doctrine says: the courts are not available to you on that basis.

Justice Marvic Leonen: The opposite of preserving the status quo

Justice Leonen’s concurrence is the most philosophically ambitious. He begins with the “nanlaban” parallel — a word that has become synonymous with the drug war’s justification for extrajudicial killing. Suspects “fought back,” and so they were shot. They had no courts. They had no lawyers. They had no due process.

The same state power that deployed that killing code, Leonen observes, is now using every available legal mechanism to avoid accountability for it. The irony is not accidental. It is structural. It reveals how law can serve opposite functions depending on who is invoking it: against the powerless, it is swift and lethal; for the powerful, it is an elaborate architecture of delay and protection.

On the purely legal question, Leonen takes a position that distinguishes him from all the other concurring justices. He actually agrees with the dissent on one point: the right to liberty is a real, existing right — a right in esse that does not need to be “established” by prior proceedings. It inheres in every person. He accepts this argument completely.

But then he asks the question that changes everything: has that right been violated yet?

The ICC warrant exists. But it has not been executed. No one has come for Dela Rosa. He remains free, a sitting senator, able to travel and speak and vote. The warrant is a legal threat — but liberty, in its legal sense, means freedom from actual physical constraint. That constraint has not been imposed.

This is a crucial distinction. Think of it this way: if someone announces they are planning to enter your house without permission, your property right still exists and is very real. But a court cannot issue an injunction against a trespass that has not yet occurred based merely on a stated intention, especially when the “trespasser” is acting under lawful authority.

And then comes Leonen’s most precise legal argument, rendered in a single sentence: “Equity does not preserve the status quo by altering it.”

The SQAO (Status Quo Ante Order) is an equitable remedy designed to restore and preserve the state of things before the contentious event. But what exactly is the status quo here? Dela Rosa is currently free — because, among other reasons, he evaded legal process for six months and is now back because he chose to return. The ICC warrant is already in existence. An SQAO that prevents the warrant from being acted upon would not merely freeze the clock. It would alter the legal reality — transforming a valid, operative international warrant into a nullity by judicial decree. This is not restoring the status quo. This is manufacturing a new one, where Dela Rosa enjoys an immunity that no law grants him.

Leonen also raises the concern of what he calls institutional maturation. The ICC was designed as a complement to domestic justice systems — a last resort when domestic courts fail. The principle is called complementarity. If the Philippines treats the ICC as a substitute for building its own accountability architecture, something is lost: the domestic legal system never develops the muscles, the jurisprudence, the institutional capacity to handle crimes against humanity itself. The Philippines should be building that capacity, not outsourcing its failures to The Hague.

Justice Rodil Zalameda: The rule that equity cannot eat the statute

Justice Zalameda’s contribution is the most doctrinally conservative — and for that reason, perhaps the most durable. His central argument is one that first-year law students are taught but that is sometimes forgotten in high-stakes constitutional litigation: equity fills gaps in the law; it cannot override the law.

There is a specific statute here: Section 17 of Republic Act No. 9851, the Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law. This provision was enacted by Congress as the Philippines’ domestic legal framework for cooperation with international criminal tribunals. It is the legislature’s sovereign choice. It is currently in force. It is law.

The SQAO is an equitable remedy. Its entire basis is the court’s equitable power to do justice in the absence of an applicable legal rule. But RA 9851 Section 17 is an applicable legal rule. Equity does not get to walk in and say: “I know there’s a statute, but I’m going to override it anyway in the name of fairness.” As Zalameda puts it in a formulation that will become a landmark quotation: “Equity is applied only in the absence of, and never against, statutory law.”

He then systematically dismantles one of the dissent’s most persistent arguments: that the protections embedded in the extradition process should apply here. This argument confuses two legally distinct instruments. Extradition is a state-to-state mechanism, governed by bilateral treaties, designed to return individuals for prosecution under each state’s domestic criminal law. Surrender to an international tribunal is a completely different instrument — state to a multilateral international institution, governed by the Rome Statute and domestically by RA 9851, designed for prosecution of international crimes under international law.

The difference matters because the procedural protections designed for extradition were designed with extradition’s specific characteristics in mind. Importing them wholesale into the surrender context is not applying the law — it is applying the wrong law.

Zalameda quotes the late Italian-British international law scholar Antonio Cassese, who described the ICC as a “giant without arms and legs.” The ICC can issue warrants, conduct proceedings, and render judgments. It cannot physically enforce any of this. It has no police force. It has no territory. It depends entirely on state cooperation. When the Philippines enacted RA 9851, it chose to be that cooperation. A court cannot, through equitable intervention, reverse a legislative policy choice.

Justice Jhosep Singh: The Constitution was written against the state, not for state officials

Justice Singh’s concurrence may be the shortest of the four, but it delivers what is perhaps the most historically grounded argument: the 1987 Philippine Constitution was written in the shadow of the Marcos dictatorship. Its Bill of Rights — including the provisions on liberty and unreasonable seizure that Dela Rosa invokes — was designed specifically to protect ordinary Filipinos from abusive state power. It was written as a charter for the people’s protection against their government.

The argument that those same constitutional protections should now be invoked by a state official to escape accountability for what he allegedly did while wielding state power — that the Constitution should function as a shield for the very kind of official abuse it was designed to prevent — gets the Constitution exactly backwards.

“The 1987 Constitution is a charter against impunity,” Singh writes. “Constitutional guarantees may not be invoked as talismans to disable lawful accountability.”

He also applies what lawyers call the clean hands doctrine — an ancient principle of equity jurisprudence that holds: one who seeks the protection of a court of equity must come to that court with clean hands. You cannot invoke equity’s protection while you are yourself engaged in inequitable conduct.

Citing University of the Philippines v. Catungal, Jr. and the US Supreme Court’s Precision Instrument Manufacturing Co. v. Automotive Maintenance Machinery Co., Singh observes that Dela Rosa’s six months of evasion, followed by his return for political purposes and immediate application for judicial protection, does not constitute clean hands. A person who runs from legal process cannot immediately turn to the same legal system and ask it to shelter him.

Singh also addresses the constitutional provision on unreasonable seizure (Article III, Section 2) directly. That provision, he argues, must be read functionally — it was designed to protect people from the arbitrary, unreasonable actions of Philippine state officers. An ICC warrant is not a Philippine domestic warrant. It is an international instrument that, when acted upon by Philippine authorities, does so through the framework of RA 9851. It triggers a different legal regime. Reading Article III, Section 2 as an absolute bar against all action on an ICC warrant — regardless of its domestic legal basis — misreads both the provision’s history and its purpose.

“No public official can wear the oath of office as an armor against liability.”

What Is Law Actually For?

Taken together, the four concurring opinions raise a question that goes deeper than the specific facts of Dela Rosa’s petition: what is due process actually for?

In one reading, due process is a personal right — a protection belonging to each individual against the power of the state. In that reading, Dela Rosa’s argument is straightforward: I have rights, the state wants to arrest me, those rights must be protected.

But Philippine jurisprudence has long recognized a broader reading — one the concurring justices collectively vindicate. Due process is not just a personal right. It is a systemic guarantee. It ensures that legal proceedings are fair, that both sides are heard, that evidence is properly weighed, that the outcome reflects the truth of what happened. When due process functions properly, it protects the accused — and it protects the victim, the public, and the integrity of the legal order itself.

In a case involving 20,322 deaths, the systemic question cannot be separated from the personal one. The families of those who died in the drug war have a due process interest in having those deaths investigated. They have an interest in knowing whether the killings were lawful or unlawful, ordered or unauthorized, justified or criminal. They have an interest in a finding of accountability if the evidence supports it.

When Dela Rosa asks the Supreme Court to freeze all proceedings before that investigation can even begin — before a single piece of evidence is admitted, before a single witness testifies, before a single argument is heard on the merits — he is asking the Court to deprive those families of their due process interest. He is asking the Court to protect his rights by extinguishing theirs.

The concurring justices refused to do that. And they gave us the legal reasoning to understand why that refusal was not just politically convenient — it was constitutionally and doctrinally compelled.

The Six-Month Question

Let us be direct about something that the concurring opinions collectively refuse to let slide into the background: Senator Dela Rosa was outside the Philippines for approximately six months while this case was developing. He did not engage the ICC process. He did not file preemptive challenges before international fora. He did not return to the Philippines to confront the legal proceedings head-on.

He came home to vote in a Senate leadership election.

Then, having secured his preferred political outcome, he filed his petition.

There is a legal doctrine — the fugitive disentitlement doctrine — that addresses exactly this situation. It has been applied by the Philippine Supreme Court in Vallacar Transit, Inc. v. Yanson, Jr. (G.R. No. 259337, November 25, 2025). Its logic is one of fundamental fairness: the courts exist to resolve legal disputes. They are not available to someone who wants to use the courts when it suits him and evade them when it does not.

There is also the clean hands doctrine — the equitable principle that one who seeks equitable relief must not have engaged in inequitable conduct in relation to the subject of that relief. Six months of evasion followed by a politically timed return and an immediate application for judicial protection does not constitute equitable conduct.

These are not technical doctrines invented to disadvantage Dela Rosa specifically. They are principles that exist to protect the integrity of the judicial system itself — to ensure that courts are places for resolving disputes in good faith, not instruments for managing legal liability on a convenient schedule.

What about the Philippines’ withdrawal from the ICC?

It is worth addressing the argument that the concurring justices — and the dissenters too, for that matter — take seriously: the Philippines withdrew from the Rome Statute, effective March 17, 2019. Does the ICC still have jurisdiction over Dela Rosa for acts allegedly committed while the Philippines was still a member?

The concurring justices, consistent with the ponencia’s framework, treat this as a genuinely open question — one that must be decided on the merits after full briefing and argument. They do not prejudge it. But they note several important points.

First, the ICC Appeals Chamber itself, on April 22, 2026, confirmed that the ICC retains jurisdiction over acts committed during the period the Philippines was a party to the Rome Statute. This is consistent with Article 127(2) of the Rome Statute, which explicitly provides that withdrawal does not affect proceedings already underway or matters arising from conduct during the period of membership. The Philippine Supreme Court acknowledged as much in Pangilinan v. Cayetano (G.R. No. 238875, March 16, 2021).

Second, Republic Act No. 9851 — the domestic statute — was enacted before withdrawal and remains in force. It provides an independent domestic legal basis for cooperation with international criminal tribunals, separate from and complementary to the Rome Statute itself.

Third, and perhaps most importantly: whether or not the ICC has jurisdiction is a question to be answered by the merits proceedings. It is not a question to be answered by granting emergency relief that effectively prejudges the answer in Dela Rosa’s favor.

Beyond one senator

Senator Dela Rosa will, in all likelihood, contest every aspect of the ICC process at every available stage. The merits proceedings will be long, complex, and legally contested. The Court will eventually have to answer the six questions the ponencia has identified. Some of those answers may favor Dela Rosa. Some may not.

This op-ed takes no position on what those answers should be. That is the Court’s job, not ours.

What this piece does argue is that the denial of the TRO/SQAO was legally correct, doctrinally sound, and morally necessary — and that the four concurring opinions provide the most rigorous explanation of why.

They explain why due process is bilateral — not just a right of the accused but a right of the victims, the families, the public.

They explain why the Constitution was written against impunity, not for it — that its protections were designed for the people who face state power, not the officials who wield it.

They explain why equity has limits — that courts of equity cannot use their equitable power to override what the legislature has commanded through statute.

They explain why the fugitive disentitlement doctrine and the clean hands doctrine exist — to keep the courts from being instrumentalized by those who treat legal process as optional.

And they explain — most importantly, and most urgently — that 20,322 dead are not a rhetorical device.

Those deaths are people. They had families. They had rights. They had, at least in legal theory, the same constitutional protections that Senator Dela Rosa invokes today. Most of them never got the chance to invoke those protections.

The least the law can do — the very least — is refuse to let the Constitution become a shield for the person who presided over the system that took those protections from them before they could use them.

The Supreme Court, through its concurring justices, made that refusal. It did so not through emotion, not through political calculation, but through careful, grounded, doctrinally rigorous legal reasoning.

The Court, in other words, did its job.

A note to readers: This article draws from the separate concurring opinions of Associate Justices Alfredo Benjamin S. Caguioa, Marvic M.V.F. Leonen, Jhosep Y. Lopez (Singh), and Rodil V. Zalameda in G.R. No. 278747, promulgated May 20, 2026. It does not represent the ruling of the Court, which denied Dela Rosa’s TRO/SQAO request. The substantive questions in the main petition — including the constitutionality of RA 9851’s surrender provision and the ICC’s jurisdiction post-withdrawal — remain pending before the Supreme Court.