Wheels of justice: the ICC gets Duterte at last

0:02The Economist

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:23In Sweden, gangs have been setting off bombs for years, but the scale of recent attacks is unprecedented. The culprits? Many of them are very young, recruited online, and just trying to make a quick buck. And Athol Fugard was the preeminent playwright of South Africa's apartheid era. Our obituaries editor looks back on a career spent exploring the experience of the poor, both black and white, even as the government tried to shut him down.

1:01First up, though.

1:10This week, Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila. The International Criminal Court has indicted the former president of the Philippines for crimes against humanity. He led the country from 2016 to 2022, proudly overseeing a crackdown on drug traffickers and drug users that killed thousands. In custody, he remained defiant.

1:41He's now been transferred to the Netherlands to stand trial in The Hague, where some of his supporters protested and chanted his name.

1:53Our Asia diplomatic editor, Aaron Connolly, says their complaint was that he had been treated unfairly by the judicial system. It's ironic that Duterte's supporters claimed that he was denied due process because a lack of due process was the signature of his war on drugs. I remember on the show, Aaron, we covered Mr. Duterte's time in power and his willingness to go beyond the law when it comes to drug traffickers and the like was all out in the open. Yeah, that's right. Like, you know, as President Duterte urged the police to commit thousands of extrajudicial killings. I'm telling the Filipino people, it's going to be bloody.

2:37He promised to clamp down on drug dealers in his winning election campaign back in 2016. And he told crowds that he would kill so many people that the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat on their bodies. And told lawmakers his policy would be unrelenting. In the Philippines, it is really an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You took a life, then you must pay a good life. As recently as November 2024, before a congressional committee, Mr. Duterte admitted that he had ordered the killings and made no apologies for it. While he claimed that his hit squads only went after drug traffickers, the dead received no trials, many were deemed guilty by suspicion.

3:22Officially, 6 ,000 died. Unofficially, the real total, according to the ICC arrest warrant, may be in the tens of thousands. And given all that, Mr. Duterte's presidency ended in 2022. Why has it been all of this time before this now comes before the court? Well, Duterte was succeeded by Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who everyone calls Bongbong. He's the son of a former president, a really former dictator who ruled from 1965 to 1986. And Mr. Duterte's daughter, Sarah, was separately elected vice president. And this dynastic pact between the two families helped to keep Mr. Duterte safe for a while with President Marcos refusing to cooperate with the ICC.

4:06But then the two families fell out. And in June 2024, Sarah Duterte resigned from the cabinet over her escalating dispute with the president. In November, she actually warned that she had arranged for President Marcos to be assassinated if she herself were killed. And then in February, the lower house impeached her for making this threat. And the Senate's yet to set a date for the trial, but this dispute between the president and vice president and the two families meant that Mr. Duterte lost protection and the ICC was able to step in. And what is the ICC's case here? What are the charges? What sentence might he face?

4:41Well, the ICC has charged him with murder as a crime against humanity. But since Mr. Duterte pulled the Philippines out of the treaty underpinning the court halfway through his time in office, it can only prosecute him for alleged crimes committed before that date. But having allegedly ordered thousands of deaths without a shred of due process, he may face a long jail term after trial. But Mr. Duterte's arrest shows that other leaders may need to think twice before committing similar offenses. And that's certainly what the ICC might have hoped, what it was in fact created to do really. But broadly.

5:17We've talked a lot on the show about how kind of toothless the ICC has been in the past. Well, you know, the ICC pursues a noble aim to prosecute individuals when their own state is unwilling or unable to do so, if they're suspected of committing war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, or crimes of aggression, such as invading a neighbor. But it's often hamstrung by politics. The ICC has no power to arrest people without the cooperation of the country where they are, which is often refused. And so far, its successful prosecutions have all been of Africans and mostly warlords rather than government officials.

5:51And so in that sense, its reach isn't as complete as it might otherwise like. Well, you know, many of the worst crimes committed by foreign leaders are out of reach. For example, China doesn't sign up to the ICC. So the court can't do anything about its persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Ukraine is a member, but Vladimir Putin's arrest warrant for war crimes in Ukraine is also still outstanding. The case file on the ICC website notes helpfully that Mr. Putin is still at large, although the arrest warrant has made it harder for him to travel. So what's your kind of overall view here? If you say that the ICC prosecution against Mr.

6:26Duterte is really just a reflection of basically domestic politics, would you call this a win for the ICC and its ability to do its job? It is a win, but the ICC would be much stronger if it still enjoyed broad international support. America actually never joined the ICC. They aren't a signatory. They feared that American soldiers overseas might be subjected to political prosecutions. But now the United States is even more hostile to the court than it has been in the past. In February, Mr. Trump announced sanctions on the ICC's chief prosecutor, Kareem Khan, over what he called illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and Israel.

7:05Mr. Khan had called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alongside another Israeli and three Hamas leaders for war crimes. So for now, the big powers and their clients are still largely out of reach. But the Philippines shows how that could change. Strong men lose power. Transitions can go awry. International pressure can lead successors to head over suspects. And if they do, a trial in the Hague awaits them. Aaron, thanks very much for your time. Thank you, Jason.

8:02and journalists at The Economist, and I'm here to tell you you can get 15 % off the course by going to economist.com slash writing course. Use the code intelligence.

8:21Most villages in Sweden don't offer all that much excitement on a typical Tuesday night, and Ödokra is no exception. Jonjo Devlin is deputy editor of the intelligence and writes about Scandinavia for The Economist. But at 3 a.m. on the 28th of January, residents of Ur d 'Akra awoke to a bang outside a quaint detached home. An improvised explosive device or IED had detonated and an hour later another bomb went off in southern Stockholm around 500 kilometers away. Within a day, four more explosions had rocked the capital. That was the worst day of bombing in 2025. And although Swedish gangs have been setting off bombs for years now, the scale of recent attacks has been unprecedented.

9:12And when you say unprecedented, let's put some numbers to it. How many bombings has Sweden seen? Well, Jason, in the first month of the year, more than 30 explosions were seen across the country. And police say over the same time frame, they foiled at least as many. In February, police cracked down hard on this trend. Dozens of arrests were made last month and things have quieted down a bit. But Sweden is still very much in a precarious position. And one of the strange things with the recent round of bombings is that it seems the targets have changed as well. How do you mean? Well, Jason, once upon a time, gangs would target each other.

9:52And that's still true to a certain extent. But with these bombings, they seem to be singling out vulnerable businesses. It's sort of a pay up or blow up kind of situation. Think Chicago, the 1930s, extortion rackets. Gangs are approaching businesses. They might loan money out to a struggling firm or simply fabricate some debt. And then they go to work. They're bullying and threatening, demanding payment. and if those bullying and threatening tactics don't work, police say gangs are placing bombs at someone's workplace or at the doorstep of a family home and trying to get the money that way. It should be said that though entire houses have been leveled before and there have been injuries, most explosions don't do that kind of damage.

10:39They're really just trying to intimidate people into paying up. So do we have a sense for why this trend is so much on the up, why this is happening so much right now? There are many reasons given, Jason. Politically, a lot of focus in Sweden is placed on immigration. That's become an incredibly contentious subject as it relates to crime in the country. Paradoxically, I'd say some of the most recent bombings have been driven by more effective policing. I spoke to Cassio Dehir about this. He's a social worker at Frisuset, which is a Swedish youth organization, and asked him why gangs were changing their focus.

11:16If you ask me, money, economics. These gangs that are moving in a higher level, the authorities have obviously cut them down in a lot of ways from different areas. So, of course, they want to find a new way to make money, a new way of showing power. So I think that's why it has a lot of the type of violence it changed to, basically. I mean, essentially, Jason, the drug trade, which was once the principal source of income for Sweden gangs, is being seen as a little too high risk. I mean, it is logistically complex. Criminals are more exposed on the streets selling drugs. For many gangs, fraud and extortion are now a better bet.

11:59And that very much tracks with what we're seeing in other countries at the moment, as has been well covered on our new feature series, Scam Inc. But there are other factors at play here. Another one is Sweden's very open approach to data. Information is highly digitized and widely dispersed. I spoke to Tobias Adielsen, an expert in crime at the Business Federation, Föder Görner, and he worries that it's all too easy to identify vulnerable targets. What's probably sounding strange for an international audience is that pretty much all our private data is accessible online. Private company is selling in bulk information about all the switch citizens.

12:44So you can find information about me online. You can find out who my wife is, which my dog is, where I live, my phone number, who is my car. And they use this to target companies and also making different kinds of frauds. Criminals are sifting through large tranches of data and identifying newly founded companies or ones that are growing rapidly and attacking them. And once gangs find a vulnerable owner, they then find out about their personal relationships and those are exploited through these bombings or other kinds of strong-arm tactics. So you keep speaking of the criminals and the criminal networks.

13:21I mean, who are they? Who's carrying this out? On a high level, it's international gangs. A recent police survey found that around 600 mid - and high-tier gang members were running criminal operations in Sweden from abroad. on the streets jason it's basically kids a huge amount of bombers are aged between 13 and 15 and they're being recruited online i visited a school in south stockholm and there were several 15 year olds telling me about million kroner bombing jobs that's around 90 000 that they've seen posted on telegram and snapchat but it should be said that there are many teens that are just coerced into violence.

14:03The kid that's come to us is like, some of them are pressured into this. Some of them like have a long background in this, that been in this kind of gang violence for like five, 10 years. Charmeik Elmi is the operations manager at 180 Degrees, which is an intervention program in Stockholm. And he says threats of violence against children and teens are common and has also seen some other worrying trends. The gangs are good at finding these kids with special needs that they can use for this. And we, like a society, aren't protecting these kids good enough. Children with disabilities are unfortunately great targets for the gangs.

14:45They can be used to hide explosives in their rooms, hide guns, hide cash, even open bank accounts for the gangs. It's an incredibly worrying new focus for these criminal enterprises. And how to put an end to it then? What's the policing answer? Well, on the policing front, Jason, there have been crackdowns before, and we're going through a period of cracking down again in Sweden. As mentioned, dozens of arrests have been made in the past month, and there are law changes on the horizon too. After the recent wave of bombings, a measure that will allow police to wiretap children has been brought forward.

15:21That's going to be coming in in a few months. Sweden has also been trying to work more with other countries to extradite foreign criminals that may be pulling the strings in the streets of Stockholm. But I think there is a kind of broader problem in the country which politicians are trying to grapple with. As I mentioned, immigration has become a hot topic issue as it relates to crime. You can cut figures several different ways, but it is true that first and second generation migrants to Sweden are overrepresented in crime and particularly serious crime figures. The police and the Justice Ministry are currently arguing that mass immigration is what's fuelled Sweden's crime problem.

16:01And though that is contested, it is certainly moving the political needle. Parties in Sweden that were once for open immigration policies are taking a much more conservative approach to the issue now. For years, Sweden found it quite difficult to deal in the public sphere with questions of immigration. I would suggest, though, that it could swing too far the other way. I mean, criminologists that I've spoken to say that while these kind of macro issues need to be addressed, young people shouldn't be forgotten. It is young people that are being drawn into these kind of crimes. It is young people that are being pressured into these kind of crimes.

16:36And if the government, if the police lose focus on that, don't provide the kind of support and protection that these children need, we could see even more of the younger generation lost to this kind of crime. John Joe, thanks very much for your time. Pleasure, Jason. Thanks.

17:09I thought Fugard was never quite sure why he had done it. Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor. When he was 10 or 11 years old, he was working in the tea room that his mother ran in Port Elizabeth in South Africa. She had two black servants who helped her, Sam and Willie. They were known as the boys, even though they were men. And that day, Athol had had an argument with one of them. And they were all in a bit of a bad mood when he closed the tea room up early. and Sam, one of the black servants, set off on foot to go to New Brighton, which was the township connected to Port Elizabeth.

17:53And a few minutes later, Athor rode after him on his bike. As he passed him, Athor spat in his face.

18:04Seconds later, he regretted having done it. And 50, 60, even 70 years later, he still actively regretted it. and it could be argued that his whole body of work, which was 36 plays over 70 years, was an effort to expiate that terrible act.

18:30His main aim in his plays, as he often described it, was to ask how individuals dealt with each other. The first play that got him wide recognition called Blood Knot actually had its basis in one night when he came home and looked at his brother sleeping and realized how much his brother was suffering. And he turned this into a play in which there were two mixed race brothers, one of whom could pass for white and one of whom was pretty well black. and he contrasted their suffering. It became one of the most important plays to come out of South Africa and made him a name. His own upbringing was standard white, but it was not particularly prosperous.

19:18There were quite a lot of hard times. His father was English-Irish and disabled. He had been a jazz musician. His mother was Afrikaans. and he always said that it was his mother who gave him his morality and was more liberal than his father. He was brought up actually in an Afrikaans-speaking home but he was educated in English and that gave him a sort of mixed-up identity, a bastardized identity as he called it from quite young. He tried to see the good in the Afrikaners. He did try to strive to see that all the bad was not on one side in what he wrote.

20:05After the introduction of apartheid in 1948, Brax and Whites were not supposed to fraternize, but Æthel Fugard and his wife Sheila would go quite often to the townships. They would stroll among the shacks and the shabins, and they'd observe the people and listen to them talking. There were a tremendous variety of folk, gangsters, prostitutes, racketeers, people just trying to get along, particularly the women who struck him as particularly forbearing and strong. And then there would be migrants him from the countryside who mistakenly believed that life in the townships was good. They were called blanket boys.

20:52All these people he listened to, he picked up their idioms and rhythms of their speech, and then he tried to set them down as plays. This seemed to be the ugliest time in Athol Fugard's life. He wondered then how he could get involved in the struggle in South Africa. He didn't feel it was right for him to throw petrol bombs or Bonatov cocktails at armoured cars. He realised that he had a much stronger weapon than this, which was words. Because words could actually get inside the heads of the people in the armoured cars. oppression was everywhere in his plays but he had a way not only of making you realize how much black people were put down in South Africa but also that they met it with comedy and laughter and insults in their own language against the Africana culture against the authorities and it was this contrast often between how people were suffering and how their spirit allowed them to get over their own suffering.

22:08It was that that made his plays so distinctive and so successful. Therefore, many people wondered in 1994, when apartheid came to an end, what he would do, how would he write, how would he even function if he did not have his great subject anymore. But he soon found that there were plenty of stories still to be told. The first one was that South Africa was by no means stable, and that the poor were still getting poorer and the rich richer as they had before. There was no end, as he saw it, to the pigsties that people made of their lives, either with drugs or with drink or perhaps with greed. and there was also the hope that if their spirit had not been entirely broken and he believed very strongly that the spirit of South Africa had not been broken, the spirit of its people.

23:09If that spirit had not been broken, then it was always possible, he believed, for people to get out of those pigsties again, for people to save themselves. Even if they had endured a most evil regime and even if they had endured the burning shame of spitting in a black man's face.

23:34Anne Rowe on Athol Fugard, who's died aged 92.

23:53That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jat Gill. Our deputy editor is John Joe Devlin, and our sound designer is Will Rowe, with help this week from David Crackles. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Larniuk, and our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khadifa, Benji Guy, Jonathan Day, and Henrietta McFarlane, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for The Weekend Intelligence. This week, our correspondent returns to Damascus to see how Syria is changing now the brutal Assad regime is gone.

24:29Joy and relief and freedom from fear aren't universal.