Rodrigo Duterte

Biography

Rodrigo Duterte was born in 1945 in Maasin, Leyte, and moved as a child to Davao, where his father Vicente Duterte became provincial governor. He studied political science at the Lyceum of the Philippines University, graduating in 1968, and took a law degree from San Beda College in 1972. He then worked as a lawyer and prosecutor for Davao City.

After the 1986 People Power Revolution he was appointed the city's officer in charge as vice mayor, and he was elected mayor in 1988. Across three spells between 1988 and 2016, interrupted by a term in the House of Representatives from 1998 to 2001 and a term as vice mayor, he served more than twenty years as mayor of Davao, where he was credited with cutting crime but accused of links to the Davao Death Squad.

Elected president in 2016, he launched a controversial war on drugs marked by extrajudicial killings, pursued infrastructure spending and closer ties with China and Russia, and led the government through the siege of Marawi and the COVID-19 pandemic. When the International Criminal Court opened a preliminary inquiry into the drug war in 2018, he withdrew the Philippines from the court. He remained popular when his term ended in 2022.

On 11 March 2025 he was arrested on an ICC warrant for crimes against humanity and flown to The Hague. He was re-elected mayor of Davao later that year while in detention, but was disqualified after failing to take his oath of office.