News broke last Saturday, November 8, 2025, that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has released an arrest warrant against sitting senator Ronald Bato Dela Rosa.
In a news interview, Ombudsman and former Department of Justice secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla confirmed the speculation, saying “The ICC has issued a warrant against Senator Bato dela Rosa, a warrant of arrest,” causing a stir in the country.
But why would a sitting senator face arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC)? During the term of former President Rodrigo Duterte, Dela Rosa served as Chief of the Philippine National Police (PNP) from July 2016 to April 2018, a period marked by the nationwide campaign against illegal drugs.
Two major police operational plans (OPLAN) defined his term as chief of police. The first was Oplan Tokhang, an operation where police officers visited the homes of suspected drug users and pushers to urge them to surrender or enter rehabilitation — though in practice, many of these visits reportedly escalated into violent encounters and extrajudicial killings.
The second is Oplan Double Barrel, which focused on high-value drug personalities and included both arrest operations and targeted anti-drug raids. According to the government’s Real Numbers initiative from 2022, these and other similar operations resulted in the seizure of over P89 billion worth of drug and laboratory equipment, and more than P77 billion worth of drugs were taken off the streets.
And yet during this time, official records and human rights groups report thousands of drug-related deaths, many of whom were allegedly innocent civilians.
These operations are now central to the ICC’s investigations into possible crimes against humanity. The ICC has framed Duterte’s drug war as a “common plan” to carry out killings and other human rights violations, with an estimate of 331,694 arrests and 6,229 deaths according to official government reports from 2022. However, the Commission on Human Rights claim that death tolls could surmount to as high as 27,000 civilians.
Dela Rosa’s leadership, with some calling him the architect of the drug war, places him Under scrutiny as investigators from the ICC now examine whether or not his actions contributed directly to systematic killings and abuses.
