9 hours Ago By Reuters
The HAGUE — Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has become the first Asian former head of state to be taken into custody by the International Criminal Court over charges of crimes against humanity for killings linked to his “war on drugs”. The ICC currently has a list of 31 suspects who remain at large from the court in The Hague. Here is an overview of the most high-profile names among them.
Judges issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2024. He is accused of being criminally responsible for acts including murder, persecution and starvation as a weapon of war as part of a “widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza”. Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
Netanyahu called the warrant against him antisemitic. The ICC issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2023, accusing him of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. The Kremlin has called the move meaningless and has repeatedly denied accusations that its forces have committed atrocities during the invasion of its neighbour.
Putin was the third serving president to be served with an ICC arrest warrant, after Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir in 2009, accusing him of masterminding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region, where an estimated 300,000 people were killed and more than 2 million displaced. Sudan slammed the ICC at the time as a neo-colonialist court.
Bashir and some of his allies were jailed in Sudan after a popular uprising in 2019, but were never sent to The Hague. The army said the former dictator was moved from prison to a military hospital in April 2023. Kony, the founder and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is the ICC’s longest-standing fugitive.
An arrest warrant was issued for him in 2005. ICC judges in 2024 took the unprecedented decision to allow prosecutors to bring a hearing on charges against him in absentia, which is expected to start in September 2025. The prosecution wants to charge Kony with 36 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, using child soldiers, sexual slavery, forced marriage and forced pregnancy.
In the past few months the prosecution has asked judges to issue arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme spiritual leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, accusing him of the persecution of Afghan women , and Myanmar’s military leader Min Aung Hlaing for crimes against humanity in the alleged persecution of the Rohingya, a mainly Muslim minority. These requests are still being reviewed by a panel of judges. The Myanmar authorities have not responded to the prosecutor’s announcement.
The Taliban called the requests for a warrant “devoid of a fair legal foundation, characterised by double standards, and politically motivated”. —Reporting by Bart Meijer and Stephanie van den Berg; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Alison Williams.
