Singapore: Rodrigo Duterte might have thought they didn’t have the guts. For decades, he has done as he pleased, first as mayor of Davao and then as president of the Philippines when his “war on drugs” resulted in the deaths of thousands of people at the hands of police and vigilantes. But he would have been wrong. At 11.03 on Tuesday night Duterte left Manila on a flight bound for The Hague where he will face the International Criminal Court accused of crimes against humanity committed between 2011 and 2019. Duterte withdrew his country from the court’s jurisdiction in 2019 after it announced a preliminary investigation into his crackdown, a move seen by critics as a way of dodging accountability for the ex-judicial killings. Families of the mostly poor and marginalised people executed in his anti-drug campaign rejoiced that his run of impunity may be over. Some estimates put the war-on-drugs death toll in the tens of thousands. Amnesty International has called his arrest a “monumental step for justice”.