A Hollow Victory for the Rule of Law

When a mechanism designed to ensure public accountability is dismantled on a technicality, the people do not win.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to declare the impeachment proceedings against Vice President Sara Duterte unconstitutional, human rights lawyer and Akbayan partylist Rep. Chel Diokno’s assessment feels chillingly accurate: “In this decision, the people lost. Accountability lost.”

While the Vice President’s camp celebrates a legal victory, the nation is left to grapple with a ruling that, while perhaps legally sound in a vacuum, strikes a devastating blow to the heart of our democratic checks and balances. The public welfare, which hinges on the assurance that our highest officials can be held to account, has been gravely undermined.

To be fair, the Supreme Court, in a 97-page decision penned by Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, presented a firm defense of constitutional procedure. This focus on procedural propriety was not entirely unforeseen; constitutional law expert Michael Henry Yusingco was among those who had previously noted significant procedural issues with how the complaint was handled in the House of Representatives.

The Court argued that impeachment is not merely a “political moment” but a legal process that must afford the respondent due process. It found that the House violated this by not providing Ms. Duterte an opportunity to answer before transmitting the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. Furthermore, it ruled that the complaint breached the one-year bar against initiating more than one proceeding against the same official.

But this defense rings hollow when weighed against its consequences. Critics rightly see this as a dangerous intrusion into the powers of a co-equal branch. Former Solicitor General Florin Hilbay called the decision a “dangerous intrusion,” arguing that impeachment is fundamentally a political process, a power vested solely in Congress. The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) went further, asserting the Court “departed from the Constitution” by inventing a timeline where unreferred complaints could trigger the one-year ban. By setting new, stringent procedural standards retroactively, the judiciary has effectively disarmed the legislature of its most potent weapon against abuse in high office.

The practical effect is the creation of an almost-impenetrable shield for the powerful. Future impeachment efforts against any official will now be fraught with procedural peril, easily challenged and dismissed before they can even be debated on their merits. This ruling has not cleared Vice President Duterte of the serious allegations against her; as the Court itself noted, it “does not absolve” her. It has merely postponed the day of reckoning to a future that, politically, may never come.

And therein lies the undeniable political reality. This decision is a checkmate. It extinguishes the political firestorm surrounding the Vice President and neutralizes the opposition’s momentum, as political analyst Richard Heydarian has noted. It solidifies her position and clears a significant obstacle from her path toward future political ambitions. This is a staggering political victory, but one that comes at a profound institutional cost.

That cost is the erosion of public trust in the Supreme Court itself. With many of the sitting justices appointed by the Vice President’s father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, the perception of political bias is unavoidable, regardless of the legal rigor of the decision. As Heydarian warned, such a perception undermines faith in the judiciary as an impartial arbiter, a crisis of credibility that could inflict far more lasting damage on our democracy than a single failed impeachment.

Perhaps, in the long run, this judicial intervention will force a “refactoring” of our impeachment process, creating a clearer, more robust system. But that is a faint and distant hope.

Today, the reality is stark and blunt. The Supreme Court has chosen procedural purity over substantive accountability, leaving the public with a hollow victory for the rule of law, but a resounding loss for the power of the people to demand answers from those who lead them.