No sufficient ground to impeach Duterte: Palace

President Rodrigo Duterte cannot be impeached on the basis of his supposed admission of the “sin” of ordering extrajudicial killings (EJKs), Malacanang insisted yesterday.Palace spokesman Harry Roque Jr said there was no solid evidence to implicate Duterte, as he reiterated that the president never admitted guilt for any crime.“I’m sure it will also be dismissed by Congress not because it’s a political process, but because it’s utterly bereft of merit,” Roque told reporters.Antonio “Tony” La Vina, former dean of the Ateneo School of Government and opposition figures such as former congressman Neri Colmenares have claimed that Duterte could be held liable for culpable violation of the Constitution for admitting to authorising extrajudicial killings.The president on Thursday said the summary executions that had taken place under his war on drugs were his only “sin.” “What are your sins? Me? I told the military ‘what are my sins?’ Did I steal money? Even just one peso? Did I prosecute somebody I sent to jail? My only sin is extrajudicial killings,” Duterte said in remarks to career civil service executives.La Vina, in an interview with dzBB radio, said: “It’s clear he wasn’t joking when he said that. The demeanour was very clear.”“It came from the mouth of the President. You don’t need to prove that. That’s called admission against interest. That’s the highest and strongest evidence. Because nobody confesses unless they mean it,” he added.La Vina said there was no more need to prove Duterte’s guilt before the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is hearing complaints of human rights violations under the Duterte drug war, because there was already admission. Roque, however, reminded La Vina about the proper context of the President’s statement on extrajudicial killings, saying there was no admission on the part of Duterte. “He (La Vina) is simply wrong. He is not specialist in the field. He’s wrong. It presupposes that our judicial system is not working in the first place. It presupposed that the President actually admitted to murder. Did he? Not by virtue of the context of what he said. As I said, there is even no crime as EJK. It’s a misnomer because you know there can be judicial killings in this country because we have done away with the death penalty,” he said.Roque also said the president merely emphasised that he was never accused of corruption nor was he engaged in political vendetta. “I’d like to reiterate that the context of what the president said is that EJKs are the only criticisms labelled against him and that no one has ever accused him of corruption. I don’t think this amounts to admission because for it to be an admission or declaration against interest, he must have explicitly admitted to the crime of murder, which he has not,” Roque said.“I’d like to emphasise that there’s actually no crime under both domestic laws or international laws as EJK. In fact, this is misleading term because killing in our Constitution and in our laws is never legal so there’s no such thing as extrajudicial killings. So it’s either a lawful killing or an unlawful killing,” he added.