Philippine lawmaker moves to impeach President Duterte for murder, corruption

A Philippine opposition lawmaker filed an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday, accusing him of murder and crimes against humanity in connection with his bloody anti-drug campaign, as well as corruption. With Duterte’s allies overwhelmingly dominating the House of Representatives, there was little chance that the president would actually be impeached. But the move could eventually make it easier to bring charges against Duterte at the International Criminal Court, as at least one Philippine lawyer has pledged to do, by showing that domestic attempts to stop Duterte’s crackdown have failed, a human rights lawyer said.
“It is high time that President Duterte is punished for his sins against the country,” Gary Alejano, the opposition lawmaker who filed the complaint, said Thursday. “We are of the firm belief that he is unfit to hold the highest office of the land and that impeachment is the legal and constitutional remedy to this situation.”
Thousands of drug users and dealers have been killed by police officers or vigilantes since Duterte, who routinely threatens criminals with death and has boasted of killing them personally, took office in June. Human rights groups have said the president may have committed crimes against humanity by inciting such killings, many of which witnesses have described as being carried out in cold blood, despite police claims of self-defence. Alejano’s complaint accuses Duterte of murder in connection with the killings, saying he implemented a state policy that encouraged them in the name of fighting drugs. It also accuses him of running a death squad when he was mayor of the southern city of Davao, before becoming president. Two professed hit men have testified that they belonged to such a death squad, which they said was overseen by Duterte.
The impeachment complaint also accuses Duterte of maintaining thousands of fictitious employees on Davao’s payrolls when he was the mayor, in order to collect their salaries, and of having as much as $40 million in undeclared bank accounts, an accusation previously made by an opposition senator, Antonio Trillanes.
One third of the House of Representatives must support an impeachment motion for the case to go to the Senate for trial, and with more than 260 of the body’s 292 members allied with Duterte, there was little chance of that happening. The speaker of the House, Pantaleon Alvarez, a close ally of Duterte, said all of the charges had been “fabricated.” Even if an attempt to impeach the president fails, it will make for a stronger case that the alleged offences cannot be addressed by Philippine institutions and that the international court is needed, Bagares said.
The last impeachment of a Philippine leader was in 2000, when then-president Joseph Estrada was accused of corruption and violating the Constitution. His impeachment trial stalled in January 2001, triggering mass protests that forced Estrada out of office after serving just 2 ½ years of his 6-year term. Estrada was eventually convicted of corruption charges and later pardoned.