Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte was charged with grave threats on Tuesday (11th August) over an alleged death threat against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, adding a new legal dimension to the case at the centre of her ongoing Senate impeachment trial.
The charge was filed on Tuesday afternoon in a Quezon City court, Department of Justice spokesman Polo Martinez said. It stems from a National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) criminal complaint filed in February 2025, several months after Duterte made remarks during a late-night news briefing in which she claimed to have hired an assassin to kill Marcos, his wife, and a former congressman cousin if she were killed first.
The remarks prompted heightened security around the president and his family and led authorities to launch formal investigations.
Under Philippine law, a conviction for grave threats carries a prison sentence of between one and six months. A separate inciting to sedition allegation included in the original NBI complaint was dismissed.
Duterte’s lawyers on Tuesday argued that the criminal case could not proceed while she is facing impeachment. “As a sitting impeachable officer, the Vice President may not be prosecuted for an alleged offence that is also the subject of an impeachment case,” defence lawyer Paul Lawrence Lim said in a statement.
Asked whether the Department of Justice believed the case could proceed alongside the impeachment trial, Martinez told AFP: “That’s correct”, adding that the matter was now within the court’s jurisdiction. “That’s for the prosecutors in that ongoing trial to present,” he said, adding that authorities had met a “high threshold” before moving forward with the case.
Professor Dante Gatmaytan of the University of the Philippines College of Law told AFP that nothing prevented the two cases from proceeding independently. “This is not unconstitutional,” he said in a phone interview. “There might be theories that can be applied later on, but right now, nothing will stop the DOJ from proceeding with the criminal case.”
Duterte was impeached in May on charges that also included graft and corruption. Tuesday marked the 14th day of her Senate impeachment trial, which featured testimony from state auditors about the management of government funds. Her political career, including her planned 2028 presidential run, hangs in the balance.
A guilty verdict in the impeachment trial would remove her from office and, under the applicable constitutional consequences of conviction, bar her from holding elective office. The criminal case is separate, and a conviction could carry its own criminal penalties.
The escalation comes amid a deepening political rift between the factions led by President Marcos Jr. and Vice President Duterte. The two ran together on a winning ticket in 2022, but their alliance later broke down into an increasingly public political conflict.
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