MANILA: Philippine lawyer Jude Sabio felt it was his duty to bring President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs to the attention of international war crimes prosecutors, but now that a probe into the killings is under way, he fears he too has become a target. Sabio, who describes himself as penniless and on the run, said he had received death threats from Duterte supporters on social media after filing a petition with the Hague-based International Criminal Court in April last year. “I’m in a state of constant paranoia because I fear for my life,” Sabio, 51, said in an interview. “It could be very possible that a bullet will hit me.”
ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda launched a “preliminary examination” after receiving Sabio’s petition, which alleges around 8,000 extrajudicial killings, and this could lead to a full investigation by the court. Sabio wants the president arrested. Duterte won a landslide victory in 2016 elections largely on a pledge to eradicate drugs. He is accused of stoking the killings with inflammatory statements and repeated promises to pardon any police officer charged with murder. Police say they have killed 4,021 drug suspects in self-defence, but rights groups claim police and shadowy vigilantes have actually killed more than 12,000 people.
Duterte maintains he is beyond the ICC’s jurisdiction and has threatened to withdraw his country from the treaty that created it if the tribunal pursues a formal investigation.
“The problem with me is when I see something wrong I fight,” said Sabio, who had a low-key legal practice for two decades and unsuccessfully ran for public office twice.
“Now to the question of how it feels to be standing against Goliath, to me the fact that he is president, I’m sorry to say this, doesn’t matter to me.”
The unassuming lawyer — the son of public schoolteachers of modest means — lost the 2010 election for mayor of a southern town and was disqualified for being a “nuisance” senatorial candidate in 2016, officially ruled as lacking funds to run his campaign.
But his life started to change course when in October 2016 he agreed to represent Edgar Matobato, a self-confessed assassin whose deposition forms part of the ICC case.
Matobato had spectacularly confessed at a Senate public hearing a month earlier that he was a member of the “Davao Death Squad” that killed at least a thousand people on Duterte’s orders when the president was mayor of Davao city. — AFP
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