Ronald Dela Rosa sought refuge inside the Philippine Senate in Manila on Monday after officers chased him as he entered the building and the International Criminal Court unsealed a warrant for his arrest.
He was placed under protective custody after narrowly escaping arrest. Police said they would not arrest him while he was in the custody of the Senate, and security camera footage showed National Bureau of Investigation agents chasing him up flights of stairs and along a corridor in the chamber.
Dela Rosa, who oversaw Rodrigo Duterte's deadly war on drugs, is accused by the ICC of the killing of at least 32 people between 2016 and 2018 as an indirect co-perpetrator in the former president's anti-drugs campaign. Duterte has been in ICC custody in The Hague since his arrest in March 2025.
The timing sharpened the pressure on Manila. Alan Peter Cayetano was elected new Senate president on Monday, and the lower House of Representatives voted to impeach Sara Duterte for the second time, deepening a political fight that has split the country’s two dominant camps since the collapse of their 2022 alliance. The Senate is dominated by Duterte’s allies, while Marcos’s allies control the lower house.
Dela Rosa said he would remain within the Senate's premises and do everything to avoid being taken to The Hague. His lawyers said they had asked the Supreme Court to block his arrest in the absence of a valid Philippine judicial warrant. On Tuesday morning, he urged supporters to keep vigil in front of the Senate until the Supreme Court decides, and called on Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to file a local case against him if he believed him to be guilty. “If I have an obligation, I will answer it in the local court, not a foreign one,” he said.
The standoff now turns on whether the Philippines' institutions will move in step with the ICC or draw a hard line around domestic process. Cayetano said the Senate would only act on arrest warrants from a Philippine court, and the answer to that clash will determine whether Dela Rosa stays under Senate protection or is forced to face the warrant outside it.
