09/10/2026
Japan is not happy.
Moscow has asked the Netherlands and other countries to hand over ICC President Tomoko Akane, a Japanese national, and eight other court officials. Tokyo calls it "unjust and unacceptable" and has lodged a protest. A government doing exactly what a government should, shielding its own citizen from the reach of a foreign court.
Funny. I remember a different mood not so long ago.
When the Philippines withdrew from the Rome Statute in March 2019, with finality, as any sovereign state is entitled to do, the ICC still claimed jurisdiction over us. Its reasoning was that the case was "already under consideration" before we left. In other words, a court ruling on the limits of its own power. And when a former President of this Republic was flown into that same Netherlands to face that same court, those who questioned how it was done were brushed aside. The procedure was questionable from the outset. The world moved on.
Now consider this. Judge Akane sat on the very Appeals Chamber that, this April, rejected every ground of former President Duterte's challenge and affirmed the court's hold over a Filipino who no longer answered to it. Today she is the one invoking protection from a foreign state's reach.
And Japan's outrage is selective too. When Washington sanctioned Akane in August, Tokyo did not protest. It called the move "regrettable" and left it there. Protest Moscow, stay quiet with Washington. The principle bends depending on who is pushing.
To be clear, I am not defending Russia. Its own process, convicting nine people in absentia, is no model of justice. My point is simpler. Procedure was sacred when it protected their own, and optional when it came to a developing country.
But here's the part that should sting every Filipino. Japan, for all its caution, still stood up for its citizen. Our own government handed theirs over. One shields its own from a foreign court; the other delivers its own to it. That is the stark difference, and it tells you everything about who defends sovereignty and who trades it away.
This was never really about Akane, or Russia, or even Duterte. It is about us. It is about whether we, as a people, still believe our sovereignty means something, or whether we have grown so used to being lectured that we now applaud when our own are handed over to be judged by those who answer to no one.
A sovereign nation decides its own trajectory. The Philippines did, in 2019. The tragedy is not that a foreign court refused to listen. The tragedy is that our own government did not.
So watch closely how Japan defends its own. Then ask why ours gave theirs away, and whether the next one will have the spine to do differently.
