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Philippine lawmakers on Wednesday advanced impeachment complaints against Vice President Sara Duterte after a House justice committee found there was “probable cause” to move forward, setting up the case for possible action by the full lower chamber and later a Senate trial if it proceeds.
The unanimous decision by the 53-member justice committee in the House elevated two separate impeachment complaints to deliberations and voting by the entire House, which has more than 300 lawmakers, according to the committee’s ruling following Wednesday’s hearing.
The complaints focused on allegations that Duterte used intelligence funds in an illegal manner and mishandled such funds, including funds from the vice president’s office and from her earlier role as education secretary during President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration, the Associated Press reported.
The House hearing also examined Duterte’s remarks from an online news conference in 2024, when she said that if she was assassinated, Marcos, his wife and the House speaker should also be killed. At Wednesday’s hearing, the National Bureau of Investigation told the committee that the comments represented a threat to national security.
Duterte denied wrongdoing but did not respond in detail to the committee’s specific allegations, according to the Associated Press account of the hearing, as opponents raised concerns about her conduct and her refusal to address details of the claims.
Rep. Gerville Luistro, who heads the justice committee, said at the start of the Wednesday hearing that she obstructed the process by failing to appear in six televised hearings and by seeking the Supreme Court to stop the impeachment inquiry on multiple allegations, including allegations involving “huge bank transactions” that he said Duterte had not declared as required by law. Luistro also said that “If there is nothing to hide, there is no reason to hide, there is no reason to obstruct,” and added, “The only people who fear the disclosures of these transactions are those with dirty secrets.”
Duterte’s lawyers responded to the committee’s decision by saying the proceedings “departed from the constitutional design,” and they said the process expanded beyond the verified complaints and their attachments into matters that they said properly belong to a full trial, without elaborating on those arguments in the Associated Press report.
The Associated Press report also described additional legal escalation by Duterte’s husband, Manases Carpio, who filed criminal complaints on Monday against Luistro and other legislators and officials after government records of the couple’s bank transactions were made public in a recent House hearing, saying the disclosures violated the country’s bank secrecy law.
The impeachment fight has unfolded against a backdrop of long-standing political turbulence in the Philippines, including a bitter falling out between Duterte and Marcos after they ran together as allies in the 2022 election. Duterte, the AP said, remains popular with voters based on independent surveys.
If the full House votes to impeach Duterte, the case would move to a Senate trial, the report said. The AP also noted that Duterte survived an earlier impeachment complaint last year on a technicality, after the Supreme Court ruled that the lower chamber violated a constitutional rule requiring only one impeachment case be processed by it in a single year.
Separately, the AP said Duterte’s father, Rodrigo Duterte, is detained by the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands over alleged crimes against humanity tied to the deadly anti-drugs crackdown he oversaw while in office.