Sparks: Philippines' Duterte seen in person for first time at International Criminal Court

Power, once exercised without a court to answer it, will return to answer no court - so the tribunal must be built to outlast the man it tries.

That a man who ordered thousands to their deaths must now stand beneath a lawful roof to answer for it is the working out of a principle we hold but have never fully honored.

He called it a war on drugs; call it what the names reveal - a ruler killing his own children and calling it order.

He sits where the accused sat before him and where the accused will sit after him; the dock is eternal, the defendant is dust.

They built a tribunal no sovereign consented to and dragged him before it - the heresy here is that no center holds power above answer.

The man who said killing should be rewarded now learns what the law does to those who mistake popularity for permission - how long, I ask, did the world avert its eyes?

In every land I traveled, the judge sat above the ruler's reach or beneath the ruler's thumb; here, for once, I watch a ruler walk to the judge's bench.

As water forced through the dam must find its channel, so power that killed through channels of command flows at last to the one basin built to hold it.

They watched the bodies fall for years and applauded the watching; now they watch one man in a courtroom and call that justice.

The mothers who buried children in that war on the poor never got a courtroom, but the man who buried them must now stand in one and answer to the dead.

For years the killings were called war and the war was called order, and the common sense that named it so now faces a court that refuses the vocabulary.

Since the precedent holds that a sovereign may kill his subjects for their improvement, it follows naturally that a tribunal must exist to weigh whether the improvement occurred.