On Tuesday morning, Dela Rosa urged his supporters, who have gathered outside the Senate building, to “keep vigil in front of the Senate until the Supreme Court decides”.
He also called on Philippine Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who is feuding with the Duterte political dynasty, to file a local case against him if he believed him to be guilty.
“If I have an obligation, I will answer it in the local court, not a foreign one,” he told reporters.
The chaos that has gripped the Senate comes as its 24 members, dominated by Duterte’s allies, elected a new president on Monday.
The new senate president, Alan Peter Cayetano, told reporters that the chamber would only act on arrest warrants from a Philippine court.
But it is Marcos’s allies who control the lower House of Representatives, which earlier in the day voted to impeach Duterte’s daughter Sara, the current vice-president, for the second time.
The feud between the Duterte and Marcos dynasties have become increasingly bitter, after the collapse of the alliance which helped them to win the 2022 election.
Sara Duterte is the front-runner to succeed President Marcos in the next election in two years’ time, and she accuses him of using the ICC arrest warrants and her impeachment as political weapons to weaken her campaign.
For his part, the elder Duterte has refused to recognise the ICC proceedings, arguing that during his presidency in 2019 the Philippines had pulled out of the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding agreement.
But last month, judges in the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber rejected that argument on the grounds that the alleged crimes had happened between 2011 and 2019 – while the Philippines was still a member of the ICC – paving the way for Duterte to stand trial.