Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa called on the public to step in to prevent law enforcement agents from handing him over to the International Criminal Court as the sound of gunfire rattled through the Senate building on Wednesday evening.
Dela Rosa stands accused by the ICC of crimes against humanity related to the war on drugs he oversaw while serving as police chief under then-president Rodrigo Duterte. Dela Rosa, 64, has denied involvement in illegal killings.
Duterte, in office from 2016 to 2022, was himself arrested and taken to The Hague in March 2025 on a warrant linking him to murders committed during the bloody campaign, in which thousands of alleged narcotics peddlers and users were killed. He also maintains his innocence.
What was dela Rosa’s role in the war on drugs?
When Duterte assumed the presidency in June 2016, he appointed dela Rosa, his former police chief in Davao City, as head of the Philippine National Police (PNP), a post he held for 21 months. Duterte gave him broad authority to replicate Davao’s crime-fighting model nationwide.
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“He is leaving everything up to me,” dela Rosa, popularly known as “Bato”, or “rock”, said at the time.
On his first day as PNP chief, dela Rosa issued a directive launching the nationwide anti-illegal drugs crackdown to fulfil Duterte’s campaign promise.
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The programme, called Project Double Barrel, was patterned after Davao City’s policing strategy and aimed at the “neutralisation of illegal drug personalities nationwide”.
Its roll-out was followed by a sharp rise in killings. Police reported more than 2,000 deaths between Duterte’s inauguration on June 30 and the end of that year, most described as occurring during shoot-outs.