Who Owns the Frame: ICC Hearing and the Davao Journalist
Who Owns the Frame: ICC Hearing and the Davao Journalist
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
February 25, 2026
ICC Hearing and the Davao Journalist
What happens when the machinery of international justice meets the weathered eye of a local chronicler? What happens when a grainy frame, a flicker of motion, and a caption become the battleground for truth, memory, and theatrical jurisprudence? These are not idle questions for the philosopher or the pundit; they are the scaffolding of a peculiar drama that unfolded as the International Criminal Court convened to confirm charges against former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, and a veteran Davao journalist—call him Ramon del Mar for the sake of this tale—stepped forward to contest the prosecution’s reading of a key piece of video evidence. Is it evidence, or is it a palimpsest of competing narratives? Who owns a frame, and who owns the meaning we extract from it?
Ramon’s claim was simple and stubborn: he took that video. Simple, yes; stubborn, certainly. But what does “I took that video” mean in a world where images are copied, cropped, captioned, and weaponized faster than a rumor can cross a barangay? Does the provenance of a clip confer upon it an immutable truth, or does it merely add another layer to the sediment of interpretation? If a journalist records an event, does the camera’s eye become a neutral witness, or does it carry the biases of the hand that steadied it, the angle chosen, the moment selected, the decision to stop or continue? And if the ICC’s prosecution reads the same clip and sees a sequence that supports a grave allegation, is the journalist’s authorship a corrective, a complication, or a distraction?
There is a delicious irony in international tribunals relying on the quotidian artifacts of local life—CCTV footage, cellphone clips, dashcam recordings—because these are the very things that make modern life legible. Yet legibility is not the same as clarity. A CCTV camera records what it records; it does not annotate motive, context, or the invisible currents that led to the recorded moment. The prosecution’s interpretation of the footage was, by all accounts, clinical: a sequence of frames, timestamps, and inferred actions that, when stitched together, formed a narrative of culpability. Ramon’s intervention was anecdotal, human, and therefore messy: he could tell you where he stood, what he heard, who he spoke to, and why he had pointed his lens at that particular street corner at that particular hour. Which account should the court privilege—the neat algebra of frames or the messy testimony of a man who has spent decades watching the city breathe?
Is this not the perennial tension between law and lore? Law demands categories, thresholds, and standards of proof; lore thrives on texture, nuance, and the unquantifiable. The ICC, as an institution, is designed to translate the latter into the former, to convert human experience into admissible evidence. But what if the human experience complicates the neatness? What if the journalist’s recollection introduces variables that the prosecution’s forensic model did not account for—an obstructed camera angle, a delayed timestamp, a passerby who obscured the view for a crucial second? Does the introduction of such variables undermine the prosecution’s case, or does it enrich the court’s understanding of the scene?
Ramon’s testimony was not merely technical; it was anecdotal in the best sense of the word. He spoke of the street’s rhythm, the vendors who set up at dawn, the municipal truck that always parked at the corner, the way light fell off the eaves at certain hours. He spoke of the human choreography that surrounds any public space: the habitual, the accidental, the performative. He told stories about the people in the footage—names, faces, small histories—details that a pixel cannot convey. Was he embellishing? Was he protecting sources? Was he trying to muddy the waters? Or was he, in his own way, offering the court a map of the social terrain that produced the image?
There is a rhetorical pleasure in watching a veteran journalist confront an international prosecutor. It is as if two languages meet: the language of legal precision and the language of lived experience. Each has its own grammar, its own insistences. The prosecutor asks for chain of custody, metadata, and corroboration. The journalist offers context, motive, and the smell of the place. Which language does the court prefer when the stakes are existential? When the question is not merely whether a crime occurred but whether a state’s highest official bears responsibility for a pattern of violence, the court must balance the abstract with the particular. Can it do so without losing its claim to impartiality?
Humor, in this context, is not frivolous. There is a satirical edge to the spectacle: international lawyers parsing CCTV like medieval theologians parsing scripture, while a man who has spent his life in the margins of power offers a counter-interpretation that is at once earthy and infuriatingly precise. The scene invites a thousand rhetorical questions: Who is the true arbiter of meaning—the court that convenes in marble halls or the journalist who knows the alleyways? Can a single frame be the Rosetta Stone of a political epoch? Is the camera a neutral recorder or a participant in the drama it captures?
Esotericism creeps in when we consider the metaphysics of footage. A frame is a frozen instant, but it is also a node in a network of relations: the camera’s angle, the operator’s intention, the light’s trajectory, the passerby’s movement, the editor’s cut. Each node is a potential site of contestation. The prosecution’s reading is one path through this network; Ramon’s testimony opens other paths. Which path leads to truth? Perhaps none, perhaps all. Perhaps truth is not a single path but a braided river of testimonies, each contributing to the flow.
There is also an anecdotal politics at play. Ramon’s decision to step forward was not merely professional; it was personal. He had covered the city for decades, had known the people in the footage, had seen patterns repeat themselves. His claim to authorship was a claim to stewardship: “I know this place,” he seemed to say, “and I will not let a distant tribunal flatten it into a single, damning frame.” Is that defensiveness a form of local pride, or is it a necessary corrective to the abstractions of international law? Does the veteran journalist’s intimacy with the scene make him more credible, or does it make him more suspect in the eyes of those who prefer distance?
Rhetorical questions proliferate because the situation resists tidy answers. If the ICC accepts Ramon’s testimony, does it set a precedent that local provenance can overturn forensic interpretation? If it rejects him, does it risk appearing aloof, indifferent to the texture of local knowledge? The court must navigate between two perils: the relativism of anecdote and the hubris of technocracy. How does an institution built to adjudicate the gravest crimes avoid becoming a machine that reduces human complexity to checkboxes?
Humor returns in the form of absurdity: the idea that a grainy clip could carry the weight of a presidency’s moral ledger. Yet absurdity is often the cousin of tragedy. The clip is not merely a piece of evidence; it is a symbol of how modern accountability operates—through pixels, through feeds, through the circulation of images that can be amplified into global narratives. The journalist’s insistence that he took the video is a reminder that behind every viral frame there is a human hand, a decision, a context. To ignore that is to risk mistaking the map for the territory.
Esoteric musings aside, there is a practical question: what does this mean for the confirmation hearing? The court must decide whether the evidence, as interpreted by the prosecution, meets the threshold for confirmation. Ramon’s testimony complicates that calculus. It introduces reasonable doubt about the interpretation of a key clip, not necessarily about the broader pattern alleged. Does reasonable doubt at the level of a single piece of evidence derail a case built on many such pieces? Or does it force the prosecution to shore up its narrative with additional corroboration?
Anecdote, in the end, is not the enemy of justice; it is its companion. The journalist’s stories do not negate the possibility of wrongdoing; they enrich the court’s understanding of the social world in which events occurred. The challenge for the ICC is to integrate anecdotal texture without succumbing to parochialism. It must weigh the journalist’s local knowledge against the prosecution’s forensic rigor, and in doing so, it must remain mindful of the larger moral stakes: accountability, deterrence, and the dignity of victims.
So we return to the rhetorical question that began this essay: who owns a frame? The answer, if there is one, is that no single actor owns it. A frame is a shared artifact, a meeting point for competing claims. The journalist who took it, the prosecutor who interprets it, the court that adjudicates it, and the public that consumes it all have a stake in its meaning. The task of justice is to negotiate those stakes with humility and rigor.
If the ICC’s hearing is a stage, then Ramon’s testimony is a reminder that the stage is not a neutral space. It is a palimpsest of lives, histories, and small decisions. The court’s job is to read that palimpsest with care, to ask the right questions, and to resist the temptation to let a single frame stand in for an entire life or an entire polity. Can it do so? Will it do so? The answers remain to be seen, but the spectacle itself—an international tribunal, a veteran journalist, a contested clip—will linger as a parable about the limits and possibilities of modern accountability.
And finally, a last rhetorical flourish: if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many of those words are true? If a journalist says, “I took that video,” does he claim authorship of truth, or merely of a moment? If the court convicts or declines to confirm charges based on that moment, will history judge the decision as justice served or justice deferred? Who will write the footnotes to this chapter? Perhaps the answer is that no single verdict can settle the matter; the frame will continue to circulate, to be reinterpreted, to be argued over in cafes and courtrooms alike. In that ongoing conversation, the veteran journalist and the international prosecutor are not adversaries so much as participants in a civic ritual: the attempt to make sense of what we have seen, and to decide what we will do with that seeing.
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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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