Gunshots erupt as Philippines senator faces ICC arrest warrant

Gunshots rang out inside the Philippine Senate in Pasay City as Ronald Marapon Dela Rosa, the former national police chief known as “Bato,” faced an attempt to enforce an International Criminal Court arrest warrant that has pulled one of the country’s most powerful institutions into open crisis. No one was hurt, but officials said it was not immediately clear who fired the shots or why.

Dela Rosa, once Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s chief enforcer in the anti-drug campaign, had been holed up in the Senate for days and urged supporters to mobilize against any transfer to The Hague. The confrontation came after the ICC unsealed an arrest warrant on May 11, 2026, alleging that Dela Rosa committed murder as a crime against humanity between July 3, 2016 and the end of April 2018, a period in which the court said no less than 32 people were killed.

The standoff highlighted how much of Duterte’s political network remains capable of forcing a showdown with the state. Dela Rosa was not just a senator resisting arrest. He was the face of the police machinery that carried out Duterte’s drug war, and the arrest warrant placed that machinery under international scrutiny as well as domestic pressure. What unfolded in the Senate was less a spectacle than a stress test for the Philippines’ democratic institutions, with the upper chamber becoming a refuge, a battleground and a symbol of elite protection at the same time.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. called for calm and said his government had not ordered Dela Rosa’s arrest. Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano said the upper chamber was “allegedly under attack” and later said everyone inside was safe. The language underscored the fragility of the scene: a legislature under siege, a senator defying an international warrant and a government trying to distance itself from the confrontation while preserving public order.

The drama lands after Duterte himself was arrested by Philippine authorities on March 11, 2025 and surrendered to the ICC on March 12, 2025. The ICC confirmed all charges against him on April 23, 2026, after the confirmation of charges hearing concluded on February 27, 2026. With Dela Rosa now at the center of the next legal battle, the reach of Duterte-era impunity is being tested again, this time in full view of a political system that still has not settled the question of who will be held accountable.