Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Independence of the judiciary from executive and legislative encroachment. Specifically captures court-packing, selective prosecution, judicial reshuffles.
On 14 March 2018, President Duterte notified the UN Secretary- General of Philippine withdrawal from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in direct response to the Prosecutor's opening of a preliminary examination into the drug war the preceding month. The withdrawal took effect on 17 March 2019. The Supreme Court sustained the withdrawal as within presidential prerogative in Pangilinan v. Cayetano (16 March 2021), though noting that ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed during Philippine membership is preserved. The ICC proceeded on that basis, opening a formal investigation in September 2021; Pre-Trial Chamber I authorised the investigation on 26 January 2023, and former President Duterte was arrested in Manila and transferred to The Hague on 11-12 March 2025 under the Marcos Jr administration.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.