Philippine Lawmaker Moves to Impeach Duterte

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/world/asia/philippines-duterte-impeachment-.html

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MANILA — 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 antidrug campaign, as well as corruption.

With Mr. 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 Mr. Duterte at the International Criminal Court, as at least one Philippine lawyer has pledged to do, by showing that domestic attempts to stop Mr. 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 Mr. 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-defense.

Mr. Alejano’s complaint accuses Mr. 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 Mr. Duterte.

The impeachment complaint also accuses Mr. Duterte of maintaining thousands of fictitious employees on Davao’s payrolls as 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 Mr. Duterte, there was little chance of that happening. The speaker of the House, Pantaleon Alvarez, a close ally of Mr. Duterte, said all of the charges had been “fabricated.”

“They seem to believe their own lies,” Mr. Alvarez said of Mr. Alejano and other opposition lawmakers. “We are entitled to our own stupidity.”

Aides to Mr. Duterte called the impeachment bid an attempt to destabilize the government — apparently alluding to the involvement of Mr. Alejano and Senator Trillanes, when both men were junior military officers, in a 2003 coup attempt against then-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Both men were imprisoned but were later pardoned, and went on to enter politics.

Mr. Alejano said there was “nothing extralegal” about his impeachment complaint. “We are not staging a coup d’état or any other means to oust Duterte,” he said.

The complaint, however, appeared to have been timed to support an effort by a lawyer for Edgar Matobato and Arturo Lascañas, the two men who say they belonged to the Davao death squad, to bring a case against Mr. Duterte at the International Criminal Court at The Hague alleging crimes against humanity. The lawyer, Jude Josue Sabio, has said he would do so by April.

Romel Regalado Bagares, a human rights lawyer at the Center for International Law in the Philippines, said that bringing such a case to the international court now would be premature. The court can only have jurisdiction if “domestic remedies” — like impeachment — have been exhausted, he said.

Even if an attempt to impeach the president fails, it will make for a stronger case that the alleged offenses cannot be addressed by Philippine institutions and that the international court is needed, Mr. Bagares said.

Bringing a case to the international court before then “could unintentionally lead to the further escalation of impunity, as a prompt dismissal of the case because of its fatal flaws could only give the perpetrators a deepened sense of invincibility,” Mr. 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 Mr. Estrada out of office after serving just two and half years of his six-year term. Mr. Estrada was eventually convicted of corruption charges and later pardoned.