MindaNews fact-checked the May 13, 2024 column of Rigoberto Tiglao in manilatimes.net titled “Highly paid lawyer gathering dirt vs Duterte.” He claimed that human rights lawyer Kristina Conti is making P8 million yearly for gathering evidence for the International Criminal Court (ICC) against former President Rodrigo Duterte and his two police chiefs, now Senator Ronald de la Rosa and Oscar Albayalde, for alleged murders committed in the former President’s war against drugs, from July 2016 to March 2019. His claim is false.
Tiglao said Conti is “just one of the ICC’s 500 researchers called ‘assistant to counsel.’ These assistants are researchers for the 1,000 ‘counsels before the ICC,’ the lawyers that the institution routinely recruits on a contractual basis to help its investigators gather evidence on the cases filed before it, the most famous being that of actor George Clooney’s wife Amal.”
Tiglao wrote that Conti, one of the Assistants to Counsel at the ICC, “gets a monthly remuneration of £6,500, or P6 million per year. According to ICC documents, she would also get ‘reimbursement for travel to and from The Hague and related subsistence daily allowance.’ A source estimated that Conti’s income from her job as assistant to counsel is at least P8 million yearly.”
Tiglao’s statement that Conti is receiving remuneration from the ICC as Assistant to Counsel is false.
The Counsel and the Assistant to Counsel can only participate during proceedings before the Court. Proceedings refer to the stages of pre-trial, trial and appeals. Since the Philippine situation has not yet reached the pre-trial stage, no Counsel much less an Assistant to Counsel has been named/identified.
Responding to Tiglao’s article, Conti, in a post on her Facebook page on May 13 said: “I was engaged pro bono by the victims of the vicious ‘war on drugs’ to uncover for them the truth. I cannot be formally engaged in trial until the ICC investigation is concluded.”
In addition to the List of Counsel, the ICC Registrar also created a List of Assistants to Counsel, also referred to as Legal Assistants, “from which counsel have the opportunity to select junior lawyers in building their teams in the representation of their clients before the Court.”
Conti, secretary general of the National Union of People’s Lawyers-NCR, is the only Filipino lawyer to have been included in the List of Assistants to Counsel, as of February 26, 2024, the most recent list accessed by MindaNews on May 13.
As of the same date (February 26, 2024), there were only four Filipino lawyers in the ICC List of Counsel– Heminio Harry Roque, Charles Janzen Chua, Joel Butuyan and Gilbert Andres. Roque served as Duterte’s spokesperson.
As of May 13, there had been no update on the ICC website regarding the investigation on the situation in the Philippines. The latest development that concerns the Philippines was the election on March 20 of Judge Iulia Motoc as the Presiding Judge of Pre-Trial Chamber I, the Chamber that granted the Prosecutor’s request to resume investigation into alleged crimes against humanity under Duterte’s bloody “war on drugs.”
“There are four other Filipinos in the ICC’s list of ‘counsels,’ which is a higher rank than ‘assistant to counsel.’ These are Duterte’s former spokesman Harry Roque, the executive director of the Center for International Law, Gilbert Andres, and Joel Butuyan, chairman of the NGO Center for International Law. I have no information on what case in the ICC they are helping investigate,” Tiglao, who omitted the name of Charles Janzen Chua, also said in his column. [emphasis supplied]
This is misleading because investigations of crimes covered by the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the ICC, are the functions of the Prosecutor. The role of counsel is to represent their clients in proceedings before the Court.
The ICC had started a probe into the drug war deaths in 2016. Then ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that the ICC will conduct a preliminary examination of these deaths in February 2018. The pre-trial investigation began on Sept. 15, 2021—covering crimes allegedly committed in the country between Nov. 1, 2011, the date the Rome Statute became effective in the Philippines, and March 16, 2019. This expands the scope of the investigation beyond the Duterte presidency’s “war on drugs” to also include killings during Duterte’s time as Davao city mayor.
On 17 March 2018, then President Duterte formally notified the UN secretary-general that the Philippines was withdrawing from the Rome Statute. The withdrawal became effective on 16 March 2019, a year after its receipt by the UN Secretary General.
Government records say over 6,000 were killed in anti-drug operations from June 2016 until May 31, 2022, but human rights groups estimate that the death toll may be as high as 30,000.
As with all our other reports, MindaNews welcomes leads or suggestions from the public to potential fact-check stories. (H. Marcos C. Mordeno / MindaNews)
