Rodrigo Duterte appears in The Hague as the first Asian former president to face the International Criminal Court in person

Wednesday's news is not a verdict. It is a man in a dark suit sitting down in a room he spent years trying to leave. Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the International Criminal Court in 2018, after the court opened an inquiry into the drug war. On Wednesday he was in The Hague anyway, silent, while lawyers argued about his memory and judges kept the November trial date.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment runs on the same gap. Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker and walks back into St Petersburg as if leaving the room finished the matter. The rest of the novel is the discovery that the account does not close when you close the door. Porfiry does not need a confession on the first visit. He needs Raskolnikov to learn that the case was never his to end.

Alexandre Dumas writes the state's version. In The Count of Monte Cristo, Villefort uses a legal process to bury Edmond Dantès in the Château d'If. Danglars and Fernand help him do it. They treat the warrant and the prison as the last page. Years later the ledger is still open, and the men who signed it are still named. Duterte's withdrawal was a sentence spoken by a president. It was not a verdict the court had to accept.

The useful question about Wednesday is not whether the charges will hold. That is for the trial. It is what every other capital learns from a former president sitting in a room he legislated himself out of.