MANILA, Philippines — International Criminal Court (ICC) judges urged prosecutors to narrow their nearly 20,000-item evidence list in the crimes against humanity case against former president Rodrigo Duterte, saying they should select documents most capable of proving the charges rather than submit every piece of material connected to the alleged killings.
During the fifth status conference on Monday, defense counsel Peter Haynes said the prosecution's evidence list contained 15,529 non-witness items and another 3,712 witness-related items, bringing the total to 19,241.
The list has grown nearly fourfold from approximately 5,000 items presented during the confirmation of charges stage, Haynes told the chamber.
Prosecutors said that a substantial portion of the evidence came from a large dataset of government and Philippine National Police records on drug-related killings.
The dataset contained information on approximately 3,422 deaths nationwide that authorities attributed to police operations during the period under investigation.
The prosecution said the material was initially unstructured and required years of manual review, with analysts coding individual pages and organizing the records into a searchable database.
The prosecution said it had removed about 10,000 duplicate documents from the dataset and selected materials relevant to the 57 incidents identified in its trial brief, as well as alleged killing hotspots and matters particularly relevant to the third count.
It maintained that it had not submitted the entire dataset as evidence but had selected what it considered the most important documents to support its case.
Presiding Judge Joanna Korner, however, questioned the need to include so many documents, particularly if several exhibits established the same facts.
She said prosecutors should choose the strongest evidence rather than include every document connected to an incident.
The defense, she noted, would have access to the other materials and could seek to introduce documents it considered necessary.
The prosecution acknowledged that it could further reduce its evidence list and said it would review which items could be removed or streamlined.
The prosecution explained that the list had been kept relatively broad partly because the team did not know which witnesses would ultimately be available to testify. It also wanted to avoid having to seek repeated permission to introduce additional documents during the trial.
Duterte faces three counts of crimes against humanity involving murder and attempted murder allegedly committed during his tenure as Davao City mayor and president. He has denied the allegations
His trial is scheduled to open on Nov. 30 before ICC Trial Chamber III in The Hague, the Netherlands.
