Reading every page of documentary evidence that prosecutors have handed over in the case against former president Rodrigo Duterte just once would take an estimated 16,000 person-hours, his lawyers told the International Criminal Court (ICC), a burden they say cannot be carried before his trial begins on November 30, 2026.
The estimate is part of a motion that defense counsel Peter Haynes filed before the Trial Chamber on Friday, September 25, 2026. In it, the defense asks the judges to direct prosecutors to pare down the case record to no more than 10,000 items, with October 7, 2026, as the latest deadline.
The request comes as Duterte prepares to stand trial for crimes against humanity over killings tied to his anti-drug campaign, both during his years as Davao City mayor and during his presidency. Earlier this month, Trial Chamber III ruled unanimously to keep him in detention, citing a likelihood of the former president “absconding and/or obstructing or endangering the investigation or the court proceedings.”
According to the filing, the disclosed material now spans more than 320,000 pages of documents and 1,000 audio-visual items. The prosecution’s disclosures have grown to nearly 12 times the amount it produced when the charges were confirmed.
“The Prosecution disclosed 5,275 items of evidence in the confirmation phase. Having heard the Trial Chamber’s request for a tight case record, it then chose to expand this to 62,130 items at the time of writing, being a 978% increase. The Prosecution’s ‘massive’ List of Evidence currently comprises 19,238 of those items. The Defence has no ability to read this volume of evidence prior to trial. However, even a cursory review demonstrates that much of the disclosed material is of extremely limited or no relevance to the charges in this case,” Haynes said.
He argued that the timing compounds the problem. “The sheer volume of material, disclosed to the Defence three months before the start of trial, undermines Mr Duterte’s right to adequate time for the preparation of his defence pursuant to Article 67(1)(b),” Haynes said.
Shrinking the prosecution’s list of evidence alone would not ease the workload, he added, because the defense would still be obliged to go through every disclosed item to get ready for trial.
Haynes described the quality of the newer material as “abysmal,” pointing to defects the defense says it has repeatedly brought to prosecutors’ attention.
“The Defence has raised systematic and persistent disclosure problems with the Prosecution. These include: tens of thousands of documents with incorrect descriptions, dates and other metadata; thousands of ‘floating’ pages that are detached from the remainder of the documents to which they belong; hundreds of illegible or blank items; thousands of duplicates or repetitive items; hundreds of untranslated and/or untranscribed audio and video files, and material disclosed in unreadable formats. Proceeding to trial on this basis would undermine the efficiency of proceedings and, by consequence, Mr Duterte’s right to trial without undue delay,” he said.
Rather than seek a postponement, the defense is proposing that prosecutors sort their holdings and transfer only relevant material into a fresh record. Haynes said this was the sole route to keeping the November trial date intact.
“In ordinary circumstances, the obvious remedy would be to vacate the start date of trial to allow the Defence adequate time to review the full record of disclosure and prepare for trial. Herein, the Defence proposes an alternative solution, which is for the Trial Chamber to order the Prosecution to triage and properly organise the documents in its possession and migrate relevant items to a new case record containing all exculpatory evidence and duly-triaged Rule 77 and incriminating evidence, with a maximum number of items that would be manageable within the constraints of these proceedings. This is the only way in which the start date for trial proceedings of 30 November 2026 could fairly be maintained,” he said.
The specific relief sought reads: “For this reason, the Defence requests the Trial Chamber to: ORDER the Prosecution to liaise with the Registry to create a new case record in these proceedings, to which the Prosecution should migrate all exculpatory evidence, and duly-reviewed and triaged Rule 77 and incriminating evidence, up to an absolute maximum of 10,000 items, by 7 October 2026 at the latest.”
The defense conceded that its own proposal comes at a cost. Its pre-trial brief is due on October 30, 2026, and Haynes said the team had been entitled to an organized disclosure of relevant evidence by August 31, 2026. Under the plan it is proposing, the reorganized material would reach the defense only weeks before the brief deadline, a disadvantage Haynes said is outweighed by the need for a record that can actually be reviewed.
