Presidential aspirant Vice President Leni Robredo said on Wednesday, Jan. 26, that the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has since deferred preliminary investigations into President Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, will be allowed in the country if she wins in the May 2022 polls.

Joining the “2022 Presidential One-on-One Interviews” with Boy Abunda,” Robredo stressed that she will be “very open, very transparent.”

“Papayagan ko, magiging (I would allow them, I would be) very open, magiging (I would be) very transparent,” she said.

“Kung wala naman tinatago, hindi tayo kailangang matakot. Hustisya ‘yung pinakabuod nito (If we're not hiding anything, we don't need to be afraid. Justice is what this is all about),” Robredo added.

The aspiring president will also propose for the Philippines to become a member again of the ICC after Duterte withdrew from the Court in 2019 because of its inquiries into his anti-drugs campaign.

The country’s membership is “very important to keep the government in check,” according to Robredo.

The ICC, she noted, is the “safety net” of government that abuses human rights and commit “very high crimes.”

Filipino diplomats were even part of the establishment of the ICC because they saw that “this is representative of our values as Filipinos, that we value human rights.”

The ICC deferred its investigations into the human rights abuses in the Duterte administration’s war on drugs campaign under the principle of complementarity as the country claimed it had begun its own investigation into the cases.

READ: Malacañang welcomes suspension of ICC probe on drug war

Human rights groups, however, asked the ICC to proceed with the investigation after the Department of Justice (DOJ) reviewed only 52 cases for possible criminal liability despite the thousands of alleged extrajudicial killings that happened in the name of the government’s drug war.

Duterte maintained that the ICC has no jurisdiction over the alleged crimes, adding that these should be solved domestically.

Robredo is a vocal critic of the President’s drug war, even meeting families of EJK victims and giving the widows livelihood during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The government said that more than 6,200 people have been killed by the police in anti-drugs operations, but human rights groups said the number could be somewhere between 8,000 and 30,000.