This is a historic moment—one that cracks open the seemingly immovable edifice of impunity. The arrest of former President Rodrigo Duterte on an ICC warrant for the drug war killings is a legal reckoning and the hard-won result of years of relentless effort by human rights advocates, families of victims, and those who refused to be silenced.
It is a witness to the power of collective insistence that justice, long delayed, cannot be justice denied.
Justice is not a single event but a continuous struggle. The same forces that enabled and excused the slaughter of thousands of Filipinos—under the banner of a war on drugs that was, in truth, a war on the poor—will not quietly recede.
An activist paints Stop Killing, during the 2018 State of the Nation Protest along Batasan Hills, Quezon City. Photo: AC Dimatatac
So we must stay vigilant. This moment is not the conclusion but the threshold. It is an opening that demands we keep pushing, keep watching, and keep insisting that every life lost, every family broken, and every truth buried be accounted for. Justice, once glimpsed, must be pursued to its fullest measure.
We must continue to push, to demand, to expose, to remember—because justice, real justice, is not only about reckoning with the past, but about ensuring such crimes can never happen again.
Amid the SONA 2018 we joined the 40,000-strong United People’s SONA standing with the formation of environmental defenders under the LUNTIAN Coalition. Photo: AC Dimatatac