Slow Light and Cold Cells: The Hague Trial of an Octogenarian Ex‑President and the Politics of Memory
Slow Light and Cold Cells: The Hague Trial of an Octogenarian Ex‑President and the Politics of Memory
Prolonged ICC Trial and Incarceration of an 80-Year-Old Former President in The Hague
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
February 28, 2026
The image of an octogenarian statesman in a grey cell in The Hague is at once a tableau of juridical gravity and a provocation to the imagination. It asks, in tones both hushed and thunderous, what a polity owes to the past, to the aged, and to the transnational institutions that claim to adjudicate crimes against humanity. This essay treats that image as a premise: an extended International Criminal Court (ICC) trial and the incarceration of an eighty‑year‑old former president in The Hague. It will move between the registers of academic analysis, humane reflection, esoteric allusion, ironic distance, and anecdotal intimacy, while keeping a critical eye on law, memory, and the theatricality of justice.
At the level of doctrine, the ICC is a creature of cosmopolitan aspiration and procedural exactitude. Its raison d’être is to provide a forum when national systems are unwilling or unable to prosecute the gravest crimes. Yet the very architecture that confers legitimacy on the Court—its insistence on due process, on painstaking evidentiary construction, on the slow accretion of legal reasoning—can become a source of paradox when applied to an aged defendant. A prolonged trial, by definition, stretches the temporal horizon of accountability; it converts the courtroom into a stage where history is argued into being, line by line. For legal scholars, this raises familiar tensions: the right to a speedy trial versus the imperative of comprehensive adjudication; the dignity owed to a defendant whose bodily time is finite versus the collective right of victims to a full accounting. These are not merely procedural niceties but ethical fulcrums on which the legitimacy of international justice pivots.
Humane considerations complicate the doctrinal calculus. An eighty‑year‑old in custody evokes a register of care that is not reducible to legal categories. Age brings with it frailties—medical, cognitive, social—that demand accommodation. The humane response is not to exempt the elderly from scrutiny; rather, it is to insist that the machinery of justice be calibrated to preserve dignity even as it seeks truth. Imagine, for a moment, the quotidian realities: the echo of footsteps in a corridor that once knew state protocol; the ritual of medication dispensed under fluorescent lights; the small indignities of confinement that accumulate like dust. These images are not rhetorical flourishes but ethical data. They compel a system to ask whether incarceration, particularly pre‑conviction detention, is the least restrictive means compatible with the aims of justice. The humane critique does not collapse into sentimentality; it insists on procedural creativity—medical parole, monitored release, or hybrid arrangements that reconcile accountability with compassion.
Esoterically speaking, the prolonged trial becomes a kind of modern liturgy. The courtroom, with its transcripts and cross‑examinations, is a temple where narratives are consecrated. Legal argumentation acquires the cadence of ritual incantation: witness after witness, exhibit after exhibit, each utterance a bead on a rosary of proof. For those attuned to symbolic registers, the spectacle is freighted with mythic resonance. An elderly former head of state, once the axis of national power, reduced to a litigant, recalls classical tragedies where kings are unmade by the inexorable machinery of fate. Yet unlike the tragic hero who falls by hubris, the modern defendant falls through a procedural sieve that is both impersonal and painstakingly humane in its formalism. The esoteric observer notes the irony: the very universality of the Court’s language—crimes against humanity, command responsibility, joint criminal enterprise—renders the particularity of national politics into a universal grammar of culpability.
Humor, when it appears in such a somber context, functions as a pressure valve. It is not a mockery of suffering but a human reflex against the absurdities of institutional life. Consider the small, almost comic incongruities: the bureaucratic choreography of transporting an octogenarian from a guarded van into a courtroom that smells faintly of coffee and paper; the exchange between a weary defense counsel and a judge about whether a witness’s memory is “fresh” or “seasoned”; the surreal sight of a former president, once surrounded by aides and applause, now negotiating the logistics of a wheelchair. These moments, if narrated with tenderness rather than derision, reveal the human scale beneath the legal machinery. They also expose the limits of solemnity: institutions that claim moral authority must also be able to accommodate the comic contingencies of human life without losing their gravitas.
Erudition demands that we situate this premise within broader historical and philosophical currents. The incarceration of aged leaders is not unprecedented. From the Roman practice of exile to the modern trials of deposed rulers, history offers analogues that illuminate contemporary dilemmas. The Nuremberg trials, for instance, were both a juridical innovation and a moral theater; they sought to bind individual responsibility to systemic atrocity. Yet Nuremberg was also a product of victor’s justice, with all the attendant ambiguities. The ICC, by contrast, aspires to a more universal legitimacy, but it inherits the same paradoxes: how to adjudicate crimes that are both intensely local and globally resonant. Philosophers of punishment—retributivists, consequentialists, restorative theorists—offer competing rationales. Retribution demands proportionality and moral condemnation; consequentialism asks whether incarceration of an elderly defendant produces deterrence or social healing; restorative justice seeks reparative processes that may be ill‑served by prolonged incarceration. An erudite synthesis recognizes that no single theory fully captures the moral texture of such a case; instead, a pluralistic approach, attentive to victims, communities, and the defendant’s dignity, is required.
Ironic distance is useful because it allows critique without cynicism. There is an irony in the global spectacle of a small nation’s politics being litigated in a cosmopolitan court: the local grievances that once animated domestic politics are now refracted through international law’s abstract categories. Nationalists may see this as an affront to sovereignty; human rights advocates may see it as a necessary check on impunity. Both positions contain truth and rhetorical excess. The irony deepens when the trial’s duration becomes a political instrument: prolonged proceedings can be weaponized by partisans to rally support, to claim martyrdom, or to delegitimize the Court itself. The ICC’s procedural rigor, intended to insulate it from politics, can be repurposed as a political narrative. Thus the very mechanisms designed to ensure fairness can be enlisted in campaigns of delegitimization, a paradox that demands institutional reflexivity.
Anecdote humanizes the abstract. I recall a conversation with an elderly jurist who, having lived through authoritarianism, spoke of justice as a “slow light.” She meant that justice does not always arrive as a sudden blaze but as a gradual illumination that reveals contours previously hidden. In the context of a prolonged ICC trial, this metaphor is apt. The slow light exposes not only alleged crimes but also the social conditions that enabled them: institutional weaknesses, cultural tolerances for violence, and the erosion of checks and balances. An anecdote from a small provincial town—where families still whisper about a night when men in plain clothes took a neighbor and never returned—reminds us that trials are not abstract exercises but responses to lived trauma. The courtroom’s transcripts may be dense, but they are also repositories of human testimony that, when read with care, restore names to the nameless and stories to the silenced.
Critical interrogation must address the politics of memory. Trials are acts of historical production: they select, interpret, and institutionalize narratives. Who gets to tell the story of a nation’s past? Victims, perpetrators, historians, or judges? The prolonged trial of an elderly former president will inevitably shape collective memory. A conviction would inscribe a legal judgment into the historical record; an acquittal would leave contested narratives unresolved. Even the process of trial—witness selection, evidentiary rulings, judicial opinions—becomes part of the archive. Critics worry that international adjudication can ossify memory in ways that preclude reconciliation. Proponents counter that legal truth, while partial, provides a foundation for public acknowledgment and reparative measures. The critical task is to ensure that the trial’s procedural outcomes are complemented by civic processes—truth commissions, memorialization, institutional reform—that translate legal findings into social learning.
Finally, the ethical imagination must confront the question of proportionality. Is incarceration of an octogenarian commensurate with the aims of justice? This is not a rhetorical dodge but a substantive inquiry. Proportionality must be assessed not only in terms of punishment but also in relation to the goals of deterrence, reparation, and moral condemnation. An eighty‑year‑old’s imprisonment may satisfy a retributive appetite but do little to deter future abuses or to heal victims. Conversely, symbolic accountability—public acknowledgment, reparations, institutional reform—may achieve more durable moral outcomes. The challenge for policymakers and jurists is to design responses that are both principled and pragmatic: to hold individuals accountable while maximizing social repair.
In conclusion, the premise of a prolonged ICC trial and the incarceration of an eighty‑year‑old former president in The Hague is a crucible for competing values: legality and humanity, universality and particularity, memory and mercy. It forces a polity to ask what it means to be just in an age of transnational institutions and aging leaders. The answer will not be found in a single verdict or a single sentence. It will emerge from a constellation of practices—judicial rigor, humane accommodation, historical reckoning, and civic engagement—that together constitute a mature response to atrocity. If justice is indeed a slow light, then the task is to ensure that its glow is not merely punitive but illuminating: that it reveals causes as well as culpability, that it dignifies victims as well as defendants, and that it leaves behind institutions capable of preventing the next descent into violence. In that sense, the trial is not an end but a beginning: an invitation to a polity to reimagine its commitments to law, memory, and the fragile dignity of human life.
‘WHAT ABOUT THE PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE?’
The lead defense counsel of former president Rodrigo Duterte, Atty. Nicholas Kaufman tells the International Criminal Court (ICC) that emotional arguments and media narratives have overshadowed due process, stressing that former President Rodrigo Duterte is entitled to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial based solely on evidence.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
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