Claim: International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim AA Khan grants former president Rodrigo Duterte’s motion for release.
Rating: FALSE
Why we fact-checked this: On May 6, Facebook user Love Epal April Yknip shared a 15-minute video clip of a supposed announcement from ICC prosecutor Karim Khan granting the motion to release former president Rodrigo Duterte from the detention center. She captioned it with, “THIS IS IT HOPING.”
In the supposed announcement, Khan was quoted as saying, “He needs to be home because he needs to discipline his misbehaving children.”
As of Saturday, May 10, the short clip has garnered over 2,000 reactions and has been viewed 82,000 times. This has also been shared over 400 times.
The facts: Although it is one of the options being considered by Duterte’s legal team, they have not yet filed a motion for release.
In an interview with Rappler in March, lead counsel Nicholas Kaufman said he was not “at liberty to discuss the timing of an application for interim release.”
“I can assure you that, in this case, as in all cases at the ICC, a request for interim release will be introduced at the appropriate time,” he added.
On Saturday, the Duterte camp also confirmed to Rappler that they have not filed a motion for release.
Duterte remains under the custody of the ICC because of his controversial drug war, which human rights groups say claimed over 30,000 lives. His case is still ongoing in the Pre-Trial Chamber I, with the former president set to face the court again on September 23.
Rappler has previously fact-checked another ICC-related post from former presidential spokesperson and Duterte ally Harry Roque. The post falsely claimed that the ICC had lost jurisdiction over Duterte’s case related to his war on drugs and that the former president would be released.
In reality, Roque’s post was based on a copy of a petition filed by Duterte’s defense team, which requested the pre-trial chamber to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds. It was not an ICC decision, but a legal move by Duterte’s lawyers, Kaufman and Dov Jacobs. – Bonz Magsambol/Rappler.com
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