The moment news broke that ICC judges could have their assets frozen by a powerful state, I did not feel alarm—I felt a jolt of grim recognition. For once, consequence knocked on the door of those who sit in distant chambers, passing judgment on a country they barely listen to. To me, this development feels less like injustice and more like karma catching up.
I have also seen this movie before, but from the other side of the screen. When the ICC revived its case against former President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, I watched how quickly the narrative hardened—how slogans replaced nuance, and how statistics were lifted without the weight of context. Many of these judges, in my view, seemed more attentive to international political talking points than to the lived fears of Filipino communities once held hostage by drug syndicates. The freezing of assets now feels like a reversal of roles: the insulated are suddenly exposed.
Let me be clear about where I stand. Freezing assets is indeed leverage, but leverage is not always immoral. It becomes problematic only when used blindly, and that is precisely what many Filipinos feel was done to them. The ICC’s posture on the drug war often appeared to me as pre-judgment dressed up as a legal process, a courtroom already convinced before hearing the whole, messy, painful story of a nation trying to survive its own demons.
The judges and their defenders often invoke human rights —and rightly so. But I have long been troubled by how selectively those rights seemed to be framed. Where was the same urgency for the ordinary Filipinos killed by addicts, the families ruined by drug-fueled violence, the communities abandoned long before Duterte ever took office? When judges listen more closely to advocacy scripts than to an entire nation’s welfare, criticism is not only fair—it is necessary.
What this asset freeze signals, at least to me, is that international power is no longer a one-way street. For years, smaller states have been told to comply, explain, and apologize. Now the judges themselves are feeling how fragile authority becomes when it drifts too far from the people it claims to protect. The so-called erosion of trust did not begin with sanctions; it started when many Filipinos realized they were being judged, not heard.
There is, of course, a human side here too, and I do not dismiss it lightly. Judges have families and personal lives, just as the victims of drugs and crime do. But accountability has always been personal for Filipinos who buried loved ones without international sympathy or press conferences. If discomfort now reaches those in robes, perhaps it mirrors—only faintly—the discomfort long endured by ordinary citizens.
I cannot help but note the irony with a wry smile. Institutions that present themselves as neutral arbiters often recoil when the spotlight turns on them. It turns out judges, like politicians, do not enjoy pressure when it is no longer abstract. That realization alone punctures the myth of moral invulnerability.
If there is a way forward, it begins with humility on all sides. The ICC must learn to listen beyond advocacy circles and political echo chambers, and to engage nations as complex societies, not case files. Justice that ignores the general welfare of an entire people is not justice at all—and when consequences arrive, I find it hard to call them anything but deserved.
