Prosecutors to scrutinize Sara Duterte’s fitness for office

MANILA, Philippines – Impeachment prosecutors aim to establish in this week’s proceedings whether Vice President Sara Duterte is fit to hold the second-highest office in the country, former Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers said on Monday, as the trial heads into its second week.

In a media briefing, Barbers, the prosecution team’s adviser, said the lingering question that prosecutors aim to determine in the upcoming proceedings is whether Duterte should still keep her office, as she faces an array of allegations of wrongdoing.

“This week, we will have to move forward by establishing whether the vice president is fit to be in office or not,” he said. “The big question is: are you fit to serve as the vice president?”

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Duterte confronts allegations that she misused hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential funds, amassed unexplained wealth, bribed officials, and threatened President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., the First Lady, and a former House speaker.

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READ: Prosecutors brace for intense trial week as Duterte’s top aide testifies

Her trial opened last week, and prosecutors began their impeachment case by calling to the stand a law enforcement agent who authenticated Duterte’s threats captured on video by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI).

The vice president’s lawyers had challenged the testimony of NBI Senior Agent John Mark Calilung in the initial proceedings, raising repeated objections over his credentials and the evidence he verified.

Prosecutors view the first week of the trial as a win after considering that Duterte’s counsel failed to refute the evidence they had presented – the profanity-laden online briefing by the vice president where she said she had spoken to an assassin and instructed them to kill Marcos if she were killed.

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“The authenticity is clear,” prosecution legal spokesman Benjamin Tolosa, Jr. said in the same briefing. “Although at first it seemed that they were trying to question his credentials and question the authenticity of the video, but later on they conceded its authenticity by using the very same video during the cross-examination.”

This week, prosecutors plan to call Duterte’s chief aide, Zuleika Lopez, along with another law enforcement agent and a House of Representatives security official, to testify in support of the accusation that Duterte subverted constitutional order and undermined democratic norms when she said she had hired someone to kill Marcos and his family.

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Impeachment is a constitutional remedy that allows Congress to remove high officials who have committed culpable violations of the Constitution, betrayal of public trust, treason, bribery, graft and corruption, and other high crimes./coa

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