Philippine police file criminal complaints against Sara Duterte and her security aides

MANILA, Philippines — Philippine police officials on Wednesday filed criminal complaints against Vice President Sara Duterte and her security staff for allegedly assaulting authorities and disobeying orders in a recent altercation in Congress.

The criminal complaints filed by the Quezon City police were separate from any legal action that may arise after she publicly threatened to have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his wife and the speaker of the House of Representatives assassinated if she were killed herself in an unspecified plot. She has not provided details of that plot.

A presidential adviser, Larry Gadon, separately filed a Supreme Court petition on Wednesday to disbar the vice president as a lawyer, citing her assassination threats, which he said were “illegal, immoral and condemnable.”

The Marcos administration’s legal offensive against Duterte, her father and their allies is a critical juncture in a conflict that has seethed over the last two years between the two most powerful families in the Philippines.

Speaking in a news conference, the vice president broadly denied and played down the criminal complaints, allegations and potential lawsuits against her, including a possible impeachment case and an alleged violation of the country's anti-terror law. She said the government actions were aimed at removing her from office, freezing her properties and bank accounts and barring her from traveling abroad.

Duterte said without elaborating that the danger to her life was real but added that the threats she made were not actual and illegal.

“This is really oppression and harassment for remarks taken out of logical context,” Duterte said. She also said in response to a question that she no longer thought a reconciliation with the president was possible.

“I really believe that we have reached a point of no return,” she said.

The Department of Justice said it is also looking into potentially seditious remarks by Marcos’s predecessor and the vice president’s father, Rodrigo Duterte, who said in a news conference that the civilian government would only listen if the military voices concerns about corruption and irregularities under the Marcos administration.

"There is a fractured governance. … It is only the military that can correct it,” the former president said Monday night. He said he was not urging the military to rise up against Marcos but only reaffirming the real situation in the Philippines.

Still, justice officials said an investigation into the former president's remarks will proceed.

The criminal complaints for assaulting, disobeying and grave coercion against police authorities were filed against the vice president and her security staff and other aides before state prosecutors, a police statement said. Such crimes are punishable by a jail term and a fine.

The complaints were set off by a chaotic squabble over the weekend in the House of Representatives, where the vice president’s chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, has been temporarily detained. Legislators accused Lopez of obstructing and not cooperating with a congressional inquiry into alleged misuse of confidential and intelligence funds by the offices of the vice president and the education secretary, which Sara Duterte held.

At one point, authorities were ordered to transfer Lopez to a women’s prison outside Congress, causing her to become agitated. The vice president and her staff intervened to oppose the order and Lopez was eventually moved to a government hospital, where she remains confined.

“The rule of law is fundamental to our democratic system. No one, regardless of their position, should be above accountability,” national police chief Gen. Rommel Francisco Marbil said of the criminal complaints against the vice president and her aides. The national police “remain committed to ensuring the proper execution of lawful orders and protecting public order,” he said.

"Resistance and disobedience to a person in authority not only violates the law but also undermines public trust,” Marbil said.

In a separate case, authorities delivered a subpoena to the vice president's office Tuesday, inviting her to answer investigators’ questions about the threats she made over the weekend. Duterte had said she was not making a direct threat but was expressing concerns for her own safety.

Marcos said in a televised public address that the vice president’s threats against him, his wife Liza Marcos and House Speaker Martin Romualdez were a criminal plot and vowed to fight them and uphold the rule of law.

Marcos ran with Sara Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in the 2022 elections and both won landslide victories on a campaign call for national unity. In the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected separately, and that has resulted in rival politicians assuming the top political posts in a country with deep political and social divisions.

The two leaders and their camps have since fallen out over key differences, including their approaches to China’s aggressive territorial claims i n the disputed South China Sea and views on ex-President Duterte’s anti-drug crackdown, which left thousands of mostly poor suspects dead.

Sara Duterte resigned from the Marcos Cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body and became one of the most vocal critics of the president, his wife and Romualdez, the president’s cousin who heads a congress that’s dominated by their allies.