Sara returns to The Hague next month

MANILA, Philippines — Vice President Sara Duterte will be returning to The Hague with her mother next month to visit her father, detained former president Rodrigo Duterte.

The Vice President said she would be paying the former president a visit on her birthday on May 31 with her mother, Elizabeth Zimmerman.

“I promised my mother and father that we’d be together (for my birthday). I will return to The Hague with mom because in our last visit she was unable to secure permission to enter (the prison),” the Vice President said yesterday.

“So when I talked to president Duterte yesterday, he said he’s waiting for mom’s visit and I told him we’ll see each other on my birthday,” she added.

Duterte also bared that during a phone call with her father, who is being held at the Scheveningen prison for his crimes against humanity trial over the war on drugs, he told her to press the public for votes for the senatorial slate of PDP-Laban.

“We talked yesterday, he called me up. He said to tell the people plainly to vote straight PDP-Laban,” she said.

The Vice President said her father also convinced her to change her plans about not joining sorties.

“Yes (I will join sorties). I’m strategizing what to do. My aim was to go around and thank people, but he told me not to beat around the bush, convince people to vote straight (PDP),” she added.

Apart from the 10 candidates of her father’s party, she said she would also campaign for Sen. Imee Marcos and Rep. Camille Villar, who are not part of the slate but represent “the same vision.”

‘Look who’s lying’

Former Bayan Muna congressman Neri Colmenares lambasted yesterday Nicholas Kaufman, lead counsel of former president Duterte in the crimes against humanity case before the ICC, for calling fellow counsels for the victims Joel Butuyan and Kristina Conti “liars,” citing the Duterte camp’s alleged motion to the International Criminal Court for restrictions on the identification process for the victims participating in the case.

Colmenares said Kaufman has gone beyond the ethical standards of lawyers of not attacking counsels on the opposite side.

“I would like to answer Mr. Kaufman that that was part of the request to the ICC, to limit the identification. So, who is lying here?” Colmenares asked.

“Secondly, what did the ICC do? Did the ICC give in to their request? No! It gave in, the ICC favor the victims here. How can he say that we are liars when in fact the ICC sided with us, did not side with them? Kaufman is only saying that because he lost. That’s the problem with attorney Kaufman, he is attacking lawyers or counsels of other party merely because they lost a motion,” he added.

Colmenares said as lawyers strictly observing ethical standards, the victims’ counsels did not attack Kaufman.

“We never attack Kaufman. We never attack the counsels, the counsels of any client. He is different. But it is part of the lawyers to file motions. We understand him for that. If he needs to file motion, well and good, but the moment Kaufman attacks counsels of the other side, that is a different story,” Colmenares said.

Following his earlier observation that “limiting the range of identity documents” will reduce fraud and improve reliability of the victim identification process, Kaufman maintained that they are not trying to limit victim participation during the proceedings at the ICC.

“That never happened. All I was doing was relying on what the Philippine social security system requires for ID to be verified in the Philippines,” Kaufman said in an interview at The Hague on Tuesday. “This is not a question of the judges rejecting something that the defense asked for. This was a response that the defense made to the VPRS (Victims Participation and Reparations Section), which is the internal court unit responsible for assessing victims’ applications. That’s all we did. We made observations, we didn’t make a request that was rejected. That was a big lie.”

Kaufman specifically called out lawyers Conti and Butuyan, counsel for some of the victims, who earlier objected to the defense’s observations regarding the proposed identification documents that can be accepted in the proceedings. — Jose Rodel Clapano