The Philippine House of Representatives voted on Monday to impeach Vice-President Sara Duterte for a second time, with 257 of 290 attending lawmakers voting in favour — far exceeding the one-third threshold required. The charges include alleged misuse of public funds and publicly threatening President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his wife, and his cousin the former House Speaker. The case now moves to the Senate for trial; conviction would disqualify Duterte from holding public office, potentially ending her announced 2028 presidential campaign. The same day, former national police chief and Senator Ronald Dela Rosa fled through Senate corridors after ICC arrest warrant agents appeared at the chamber, having arrived to cast a vote in a Senate leadership reshuffle. Dela Rosa is charged as an indirect co-perpetrator in the crime against humanity of murder, relating to killings between 2016 and 2018. His predecessor in ICC custody, former President Rodrigo Duterte — Sara’s father — was transferred to The Hague in March 2025 and had his charges confirmed in April.
The received wisdom
The liberal-internationalist reading of these events is, on its face, straightforward and not unpersuasive: Philippine democratic institutions are working. A vice-president who publicly threatened to arrange the assassination of the president and his family is facing accountability through constitutional process. An accused perpetrator of mass killings is being pursued by international law. The two Duterte cases together represent the arc of justice bending, slowly but perceptibly, toward accountability for one of Southeast Asia’s most lethal exercises of executive power.
On this reading, the ICC’s pursuit of the Duterte drug war case — which allegedly killed tens of thousands — is exactly the international legal order functioning as designed. And Sara Duterte’s impeachment, proceeding through constitutional channels in the House with a near-unanimous majority, demonstrates that even hereditary political dynasties are not beyond the reach of parliamentary accountability.
A different read
The reality is considerably messier, and it rewards attention to whose interests are being served at each step.
Start with the impeachment. The House voted 257 to 33 — a margin so lopsided it suggests coordination rather than independent deliberation. The reason is not hard to find: House members are elected by district, and the districts have largely aligned themselves with President Marcos’s coalition since the 2022 Duterte-Marcos alliance unravelled. The charges against Sara Duterte are serious — the misappropriation of public funds claims have merit, and a public figure recording herself saying “if I get killed, go kill the president” is not a defensible act. But the spectacularly timed nature of the proceedings (Sara Duterte leads presidential polls by 17 points, and Marcos is constitutionally barred from a second term) means the impeachment is simultaneously a legal process and a straightforward attempt by an incumbent president to eliminate his most dangerous electoral rival before the 2028 cycle opens.
The Senate is the interesting chamber. Unlike House members, senators are elected nationally and have their own presidential ambitions. In the 2025 mid-terms, Duterte-aligned Senate candidates outperformed Marcos coalition ones. The senators who will sit in judgment are, in several cases, people who owe their seats to Duterte coalition voters. A two-thirds majority in the Senate is required for conviction — and the political arithmetic is genuinely uncertain in ways the House vote was not.
The Dela Rosa episode adds another layer. His decision to surface specifically to cast a vote in a Senate leadership coup by Duterte ally Alan Peter Cayetano — only to find ICC agents waiting — has the quality of political theatre that borders on farce, but carries lethal serious stakes. The new Senate leadership immediately placed the chamber on “lockdown” and declared it would only honour arrest orders from Philippine courts. This is not merely bravado: it tests whether Marcos’s government will actually comply with ICC procedures after having agreed to do so in the Rodrigo Duterte case. If the Philippine government refuses to hand over Dela Rosa, it signals that the Rodrigo Duterte arrest was not a principled commitment to international law but a one-time political calculation — using the ICC as a tool against a political rival.
The deeper question raised by both stories is about the nature of Philippine democratic consolidation. The country’s institutions — courts, the impeachment process, even the ICC cooperation mechanism — appear to be functioning in the sense that they produce outputs. But those outputs consistently align with whoever is currently in the palace. The Constitutional Court revived the 2025 impeachment; the House executed it at a ratio of nearly 8 to 1. The ICC was useful when it targeted Rodrigo Duterte; it becomes an intrusion to be locked out when it reaches into the Senate. Institutions that work only when convenient are not, in any meaningful sense, independent. They are the appearance of the rule of law — which is better than its pure absence, but not by as much as it looks.
What to watch
Watch the Senate composition carefully: the critical question is whether Marcos can hold a two-thirds majority through the combination of loyal allies and opportunistic defectors. If he cannot, Sara Duterte survives the Senate trial, emerges martyred, and enters 2028 with a grievance narrative that plays very well in the Philippines. Watch the Dela Rosa situation: whether Philippine authorities move to arrest him, or allow the Senate-as-sanctuary principle to stand, will clarify the government’s actual relationship with its ICC commitments. Watch whether Sara Duterte files any legal challenge to delay the Senate proceedings — a Supreme Court intervention, as occurred in 2025 on technical grounds, would reset the clock entirely. And watch the broader Southeast Asian dynamic: the Philippines is a US treaty ally, and the stability of its political institutions matters for the Marcos government’s ability to maintain military cooperation with Washington in a period of heightened Taiwan Strait tension.
— J