FACT CHECK: ICC has no jurisdiction over Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth

Claim: The International Criminal Court (ICC) has jurisdiction over cases linked to the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses. 

Rating: FALSE 

Why we fact-checked this: The Facebook post bearing the claim has 897 reactions, 146 comments, and 35 shares as of writing. 

The post reads: “Ill gotten wealth ng mga Marcos at 7 counts of graft and corruption pwede iakyat sa ICC?? Mabilisang dalhin sa ICC ang nanay mong si Imelda, wala naman palang edad edad at jurisdiction eh! Para doon na rin mamatay ang nanay mo!”

(The Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth and 7 counts of graft and corruption can be brought to the ICC? Let’s bring your mother, Imelda, to the ICC, since age and jurisdiction are apparently not an issue. So that your mother can die there too!)

The facts: The ICC has jurisdiction over only four main crimes, according to the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crime of aggression. 

The ICC website describes the crime of genocide as the “specific intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group by killing its members or by other means.” 

Other means include: 

• causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
• deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part 
• imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group 
• forcibly transferring children of the group to another group 

Meanwhile, crimes against humanity are “serious violations committed as part of a large-scale attack against any civilian population.” There are 15 forms of crimes against humanity in the Rome Statute; the list includes murder, rape, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, enslavement particularly that of women and children, sexual slavery, torture, apartheid, and deportation.

The third, war crimes, are “grave breaches of the Geneva conventions in the context of armed conflict.” 

The ICC website listed the following instances as war crimes:

• the use of child soldiers
• the killing or torture of persons such as civilians or prisoners of war
• intentionally directing attacks against hospitals, historic monuments, or buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes 

The last, crime of aggression, is the “use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, integrity, or independence of another State.”

Duterte and Marcos: The post circulated online amid the political tensions between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and the camp of former president Rodrigo Duterte, who has been arrested and detained at the ICC over crimes against humanity charges linked to his war on drugs. (READ: ICC warrant: Rodrigo Duterte used DDS, law enforcers to kill ‘criminals’)

Amid questions over the ICC’s jurisdiction and accusations of politics behind Duterte’s arrest, Marcos — whose family is accused of amassing ill-gotten wealth — maintains the government was just “doing its job.”

The Presidential Commission on Good Government, the agency mandated to retrieve the stolen assets, has so far recovered P280 billion cash and non-cash ill-gotten wealth. – Laurice Angeles/Rappler.com

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