Aisha.
I'm Aisha Rascoe, and this is THE Sunday story,
where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story.
This month, Filipino leader Rodrigo Duterte was taken into custody.
He's now in the Netherlands,
where he's facing charges of crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court over his connections to a spree of killings.
Those killings were among the brutal tactics Duterte championed in order to combat drug abuse,
starting starting when he was mayor in the 1990s and later as president of the Philippines.
NPR's international correspondent Emily Fang has covered the Asia Pacific region for the last decade and joins us now.
Welcome.
Thanks so much for having me, Aisha.
Emily, what do we know about the International Criminal Court's case against Duterte?
It has been a long time coming.
Duterte became president of the Philippines in 2016, and that very year he vowed.
To wipe out drug abuse in the country.
I'd be happy to slaughter them.
And almost immediately after saying
that there was a huge spike in killings outside of the rule of law.
These were known as extrajudicial killings, or EJKs,
as people in the Philippines now call them in shorthand.