Beyond the International Criminal Court: Duterte’s Pandemic Playbook for Authoritarian Rule
By Salvador Santino Regilme
The COVID-19 pandemic was not just a public health crisis—it was a political litmus test. In the Philippines, it became a catalyst for authoritarian consolidation. Rather than leading with competence and compassion, former President Rodrigo Duterte seized the moment to entrench his strongman rule, weaponizing the pandemic to tighten his grip on power. While international attention, particularly from the International Criminal Court (ICC), has centered on the blood-soaked, state-led ‘war on drugs,’ this narrow focus risks obscuring a more profound authoritarian transformation. During the pandemic years, Duterte did not merely continue his coercive governance; he expanded it, using emergency powers to silence dissent, centralize authority, and embed militarized rule into the fabric of daily life. The COVID crisis did not interrupt authoritarianism. Instead, it supercharged it.
This authoritarian expansion unfolded largely beyond the temporal mandate of the ICC, which limits its investigation to the period between 2011 and 2019. Yet it is precisely in the years 2020 to 2022, in the middle of a global health emergency, that Duterte deployed some of his most insidious tactics to weaken democratic institutions. Under the guise of crisis management, Duterte institutionalized a new phase of authoritarian rule which was less visible than his drug war, but potentially more legally and institutionally enduring . Unlike the spectacle of street-level violence, this quieter authoritarianism was encoded in legislation, normalized through bureaucratic procedures, and shielded by the moral cover of public health, thereby making it harder to detect, challenge, or dismantle.
Laws as Levers of Power
Shortly after the pandemic began, Duterte pushed through the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act in March 2020, granting him vast emergency powers. These powers enabled the executive branch to reallocate public funds without the usual legislative oversight. Ostensibly passed to enable a swifter pandemic response, the law also opened the door to extensive corruption and blatant clientelism. The notorious Pharmally scandal, where over 10 billion Philippine pesos in contracts were awarded to a little-known firm with ties to Duterte’s former economic adviser, Michael Yang, epitomized the lack of transparency and due diligence. Investigations revealed grossly overpriced medical supplies and forged procurement documents. Beyond Pharmally, other pandemic-related anomalies included the red-tagging of community pantries and the discretionary distribution of cash aid, which local officials often used to reward political loyalty. Through red-tagging, the Duterte administration publicly accused community pantry organizers of links to communist insurgents, an action that sought to delegitimize grassroots mutual aid, instill fear among volunteers, and reassert state control over pandemic-era civic solidarity. These events underscore how emergency powers were weaponized to entrench patronage politics and undermine public trust.
More dangerously, Duterte championed the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, enacted during a national lockdown. The law’s definition of terrorism is remarkably vague—broad enough to include protests and dissenting speech—enabling authorities to target political opponents, journalists, and activists with minimal judicial oversight. In contrast to the United Nation’s relatively narrow definition, which requires a clear intent to cause death or serious injury to civilians for political ends, the Philippine law lacks safeguards and precise thresholds. Human Rights Watch and other watchdogs warned that the law effectively criminalized dissent. These legal instruments enabled Duterte to suppress civil liberties while claiming to protect national security.
What makes these legislative moves particularly troubling is their persistence. Unlike emergency measures with sunset clauses, the Anti-Terrorism Act institutionalized authoritarian mechanisms into the Philippine legal framework. This erased the line between short-term emergency response and the long-term erosion of democratic norms, turning exceptional measures into permanent tools of repression. Given the enduring dominance of pro-administration coalitions in both houses of Congress—where Duterte allies and Marcos loyalists hold significant majorities—the likelihood of the Act being repealed or meaningfully amended remains low.
The judiciary and legislature, which should safeguard democratic accountability, were systematically sidelined. Congressional deliberations on emergency measures were fast-tracked with minimal debate, often justified by the urgency of the health crisis. Key legislation such as the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act and the Anti-Terrorism Act passed with little meaningful opposition or scrutiny. Meanwhile, judicial oversight of executive actions stalled, as courts operated at reduced capacity and hesitated to challenge the administration’s sweeping mandates. In effect, Duterte reduced co-equal branches of government to mere formalities, rubber-stamping presidential directives while critical oversight mechanisms withered.
Suppression of Media and Civil Society
A key component of Duterte’s pandemic authoritarianism was his effort to neutralize independent media. In May 2020, the government forced the shutdown of ABS-CBN, the largest multimedia conglomerate in the country. Although presented as a licensing issue, the move was widely interpreted as retaliation for the network’s critical reporting.
At the same time, journalists faced escalating legal harassment. Nobel laureate Maria Ressa was convicted of cyberlibel in 2020, a case viewed as emblematic of the administration’s broader assault on press freedom. Social media became a battlefield for influence and intimidation, with state-linked disinformation campaigns and online harassment targeting government critics.
Even beyond formal media channels, civil society organizations experienced intensified scrutiny. Human rights defenders were surveilled, red-tagged, and in some cases, subjected to extrajudicial violence . In an environment of fear, space for independent civic activity diminished dramatically.
The government also strategically used pandemic regulations to curb protests and union organizing. Restrictions on public gatherings were applied selectively, often targeting dissenters while overlooking pro-government rallies. Legal repression was combined with the specter of virus transmission to stigmatize activism.
These patterns mirrored authoritarian tactics elsewhere, but gained unique traction in the Philippines, where Duterte had already laid the groundwork for illiberal governance. For instance, Duterte’s imposition of military-enforced lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, including threats to ‘shoot-to-kill’ violators, mirrors securitized pandemic responses in places like Hungary and Nicaragua but was uniquely normalized in the Philippines due to pre-existing public support for strongman rule. The pandemic simply offered an opportunity to entrench these measures with public acquiescence, cloaked in the language of national emergency.
Militarization of Health Governance
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Duterte’s approach was his militarized pandemic response. Instead of relying on public health experts, he placed retired generals and military officers in key leadership roles, including the national Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF). This reflected not just a personnel choice, but a governing philosophy of prioritizing order over expertise, and coercion over care.
Strict lockdowns were enforced through a sprawling network of police and military checkpoints, often in densely populated and impoverished areas. In just 76 days, the Philippine National Police charged 57,177 individuals with quarantine violations. An overwhelming majority of these individuals came from poor and marginalized communities, reflecting not only a public health strategy, but also a punitive, class-biased mechanism of social control. Duterte’s infamous directive to "shoot them dead" when referring to lockdown violators was emblematic of his hardline posture.
Military-led distribution of aid also meant that the state’s relief efforts were often fused with political patronage. Communities and households aligned with the local ruling coalition reported quicker access to supplies. The result was a securitized form of pandemic response that prioritized discipline and loyalty over equity and effectiveness.
The militarization of governance during this time was not a momentary aberration. It entrenched a norm where crisis management became indistinguishable from authoritarian control. Health, once the domain of science and solidarity, became a tool for surveillance and subjugation.
Moreover, the pandemic served as a background condition for the long-term normalization of military involvement in civilian governance. Command posts, curfews, and armed patrols, all measures initially framed as temporary, fostered a culture of impunity and desensitization to state violence. This shift has profound implications for the country’s democratic resilience.
Authoritarianism Beyond the Drug War
To view Duterte’s governance only through the lens of the drug war is to miss a more comprehensive and troubling transformation. The pandemic enabled a deepening of executive power that extended into law, media, and civil society. It marked a phase of authoritarian consolidation that, while less bloody than the drug war, may be more enduring in its institutional impact.
Duterte’s regime during this time fits the model of a competitive authoritarian system. Democratic procedures remained on paper, but they were hollowed out in practice. Elections occurred, but the playing field was systematically tilted in favor of the ruling coalition through state control of information, legal repression, and coercive enforcement.
This analysis aligns with broader research on authoritarian adaptation during crises. In moments of emergency, authoritarian regimes often reframe themselves as efficient problem-solvers while subtly dismantling opposition. Duterte’s case exemplifies this pattern. His rhetoric framed dissent as destabilizing and compliance as patriotic. Duterte publicly labeled critics of pandemic policies as “enemies of the state” and urged citizens to “obey or face arrest,” explicitly linking dissent to subversion and loyalty to nationalism. Under the banner of national unity, critical institutions were bent toward partisan control.
Why It Still Matters
Although Duterte has left office, the architecture of authoritarian governance remains. His daughter, Sara Duterte, is Vice President. The Anti-Terrorism Act is still on the books. Many of the pandemic-era institutional changes persist, such as the normalization of military oversight in civilian affairs. The potential for future abuse has been baked into the legal and political structure.
For international observers and advocates of democracy , this calls for a broader approach to accountability. Institutions like the ICC are vital, but their temporal and thematic limitations can obscure more complex forms of democratic erosion. Holding Duterte accountable must include recognition of how he weaponized a global crisis to expand executive power. Equally important is the role of domestic institutions, including courts, legislatures, audit bodies, and civil society watchdogs, which must be empowered and protected to investigate, expose, and counteract authoritarian overreach from within. Indeed, scholars and policy organizations have recommended concrete measures such as strengthening judicial independence through transparent appointment processes, enhancing legislative oversight via mandatory public hearings, institutionalizing independent auditing mechanisms with real-time reporting, and ensuring legal protections and funding for civil society organizations.
The Philippines offers a cautionary tale of how a pandemic, while a public health emergency, can also serve as a rare political opportunity for authoritarian regimes to further consolidate their rule. If the international community focuses solely on Duterte’s war on drugs, it risks ignoring how his administration undermined democracy in less known but equally damaging ways.
Duterte’s authoritarianism did not end with the last drug raid. It evolved, adapted, and spread during the pandemic, and unless confronted in full, its legacy will endure.
Salvador Santino Regilme is Associate Professor and Chair of International Relations Program at Leiden University’s Institute of History, where he also serves as Chair of the MA in International Relations Program. His research focuses on international human rights norms, North–South relations, global security, and U.S. foreign policy.
He is the author of Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2021), which received the 2023 Cecil B. Currey Book Award from the Association of Global South Studies and the 2024 Best Book in Human Rights – Honorable Mention from the International Studies Association. His forthcoming book, United States and Chinese Foreign Assistance and Diplomacy: Aid for Dominance, is under contract with Manchester University Press.
Regilme has held fellowships at Yale University, the Max Planck Institute, and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, and was previously a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Northern Illinois University. He earned his joint PhD in Political Science and North American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin, with a Fox International Fellowship at Yale. His research has received awards from the ISA, ASA, and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.
People walk past various stores in Quiapo (IMF/Lisa Marie David).
Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
