Do we like Rodrigo Duterte?
Our score: 2 out of 10. Years of demeaning words about women and gay people, plus untested but serious drug-war charges, with only a few signed laws on the other side.
Duterte was born in 1945 into a political family: his father was a local mayor and governor. He was expelled from primary school twice, took a law degree at San Beda in 1972, then became a Davao City prosecutor. He was elected mayor in 1988, served seven terms there with stints as congressman and vice mayor in between, and became the 16th president in 2016 on a tough-on-crime pitch.
The big stoush is the drug war. ICC prosecutors charge three counts of crimes against humanity: murders in Davao by the so-called Davao Death Squad while he was mayor, plus killings of targets and in neighbourhood clearance operations as president. Police counted around 6,200 suspects killed in anti-drug operations in his term, and the arrest warrant alleges he created, funded and armed death squads. He told Filipinos in 2025 he accepted full responsibility for the campaign, and in a 2024 Senate hearing he reportedly said he had kept a death squad as mayor, then backed off the label. None of this has been tested at trial yet.
On LGBTQ+ people it is a mixed bag, and not a good one. In 2019 he told a Tokyo crowd that “Beautiful women cured me” of being gay, and the gay and trans group Bahaghari called it dangerous. His Palace later said he backed a gender equality bill but opposed same-sex marriage, and in 2019 it said he would not certify the SOGIE bill as urgent, preferring a general anti-discrimination law.
On press freedom, ABS-CBN, the country's biggest broadcaster, went off air in May 2020 after allied lawmakers declined to act on its licence renewal. He had voiced disdain for the network for years, and press groups called it an attack on free speech. On the facts, Vera Files rated a claim of his that six to eight soldiers or police died daily in drug cases as unsupported by official data, which listed 86 over the period.
The good stuff is real but thin in what we found. He signed a landmark mental health law in June 2018. On the planet, he cooled on the Paris climate deal in 2016, and green groups gave his term mixed reviews. That is honestly most of the list.
So where does that leave us? Confirmation of charges is not a finding of guilt, and he skipped the February hearings. If the trial proves the allegations, the good-person test gets much worse. Even setting the killings aside, his words about women and gay people decide the harm test.