Junk impeachment articles, VP asks Senate tribunal
Meeting a deadline on Monday to respond to her impeachment case, Vice President Sara Duterte asked the Senate convening as the impeachment court to junk the articles of impeachment against her, describing these as “nothing more than a scrap of paper.”
In her 34-page answer ad cautelam (with caution), Duterte told the Senate tribunal that the fourth impeachment complaint against her violated the constitutional prohibition against the filing, within a year, of more than one case against an impeachable official.
The complaint endorsed by 215 House lawmakers on Feb. 5 should be thrown out for being “void ab initio” (void from the start), she said—the same arguments she raised in her pending petition before the Supreme Court to stop her impeachment trial.
“There are no statements of ultimate facts in the fourth impeachment complaint. Stripped of its ‘factual’ and legal conclusions, it is nothing more than a scrap of paper,” the Vice President said, adding that the complaint was “a clear abuse of the impeachment process.”
Last-minute submission
The complaint stemmed from Duterte’s alleged misuse of P612.5 million in confidential funds, and from her online rant in November last year in which she said she had ordered the assassination of President Marcos, first lady Liza Araneta-Marcos and Speaker Martin Romualdez.
She is accused, all in all, of culpable violation of the Constitution, betrayal of public trust and graft and corruption.
Senate Secretary Renato Bantug Jr., who also acts as the impeachment tribunal’s clerk of court, received Duterte’s pleading at 5:49 p.m., narrowly beating Monday’s deadline for her response to the summons that the senator-judges issued on June 10.
Earlier that afternoon, a messenger from Fortun Narvasa & Salazar firm, where the Vice President has tapped 16 lawyers to represent her, brought to the House a copy of her response to the impeachment court.
Trial before other raps
A lawmaker on Monday noted there is jurisprudence stating that an impeachable official must first be impeached before being charged in court with a criminal offense.
“[T]here is a case, regarding the Ombudsman versus Court of Appeals, wherein our respectable Supreme Court said impeachable officers like the Ombudsman, before they are charged, must first be impeached,” said Manila Rep. Joel Chua, who also expressed surprise over Ombudsman Samuel Martires’ prompt work just over the weekend, directing Duterte to answer charges of fund misappropriation filed on June 16 by House lawmakers.
“I do not know how this jurisprudence can be reconciled with the case of our Vice President, if ever [the Ombudsman] releases a decision before the impeachment court comes up with its decision [following her trial],” the lawmaker said.
Chua cited a 1995 decision by the Supreme Court on petitions seeking to disbar then Ombudsman Aniano Desierto. The high court ruled then that the Ombudsman “must first be removed from office via the constitutional route of impeachment under Sections 2 and 3 of Article XI of the 1987 Constitution.”
“Should the tenure of the Ombudsman be thus terminated by impeachment, he may then be held to answer either criminally or administratively—e.g., in disbarment proceedings—for any wrong or misbehavior which may be proven against him in appropriate proceedings,” the Supreme Court had said.
Chua, a member of the House prosecution team in the upcoming trial, said: “From what I understand, …we must first wait for the [outcome] of the impeachment [trial] before other related charges are filed, in case the Vice President is [tried].”
The lawmaker said a possible solution would be for the Ombudsman to investigate first the other respondents in the charges against the Vice President.
“But we don’t want to insinuate [anything about] what is in the mind of our Ombudsman,” Chua said, adding that the Ombudsman may have seen there was probable cause in the charge that the Vice President misused the confidential funds in her office and in the Department of Education which she used to head.
