Kaufman disproves ‘common plan’; says Duterte speeches taken ‘out of context’

By Nash Villena, Philippine Canadian Inquirer
February 26, 2026

(Photo courtesy: International Criminal Court)

THE HAGUE, The Netherlands — Duterte’s lead defense counsel Atty. Nicholas Kaufman flagged on Thursday’s pre-trial hearing several evidentiary inconsistencies from the prosecution panel’s presentation, as well as disproving the alleged existence of a “common plan” to coordinately target and “neutralize” the Filipino population through extrajudicial killings, among other points.

“Let us ask ourselves whether the alleged attack in this case was directed at the population as a whole or at a subjectively defiant subgroup of perceived or alleged criminal offenders,” Kaufman said, in a move to counter the prosecutor’s stance that the alleged attacks under ex-president Duterte’s anti-illegal drugs campaign constituted a crime against humanity.

Kaufman similarly pointed out the Philippine media’s focus on framing the former president’s speeches, in which the prosecution ‘cherry-picked’ and took those out of context.

“If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from the domestic media coverage of this case, it is that journalists and their editors have a tendency to fixate on the salacious elements of a person’s speeches while ignoring the less interesting parts, and so it was with Rodrigo Duterte,” he said.

He also stated that there is no reason to believe that Duterte’s disappearance from the political scene would have impeded the incidents of murder at the hands of state agents or vigilantes after he stepped out of his presidential post, claiming that these killings still persist under the current administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

“The victims’ representatives [are] not clamoring for accountability for those deaths or is it of no consequence now that Mr. Duterte is sitting at the ICC detention center?” he argued.

The fourth and final pre-trial hearing of Duterte’s crime against humanity case will take place tomorrow Friday, February 27, wherein the defense will continue their submissions and all parties will have time to deliver their closing statements.