FORMER Far Eastern University (FEU) law dean Mel Sta. Maria pushed back against attempts to hold the House Committee on Justice liable under the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) and Data Privacy Act, saying the panel is simply carrying out its constitutional mandate in the impeachment proceedings against Vice President Sara Z. Duterte.
Sta. Maria laid out on Monday 10 reasons why the criminal complaint that Duterte’s husband Atty. Manases Carpio filed against justice committee members is legally flawed.
First, he said, no law supersedes the Constitution. Where a conflict exists, the Constitution prevails and the offending law must yield.
“At the apex of our legal system sits the Constitution. It is the supreme law of the land. It is the sun around which all statutes—including the AMLA and the Data Privacy Act—must orbit,” Sta. Maria said in a Facebook post.
The Constitution grants the House the exclusive power to initiate all impeachment cases. Sta. Maria stressed that these proceedings are sui generis, or a unique creation of the Constitution itself, designed to hold the country’s highest public officials accountable and is “a sovereign command.”
Sta. Maria also pointed out that even the Supreme Court, despite striking down the first impeachment bid against Duterte, recognizes impeachment as a “constitutional and legal procedure with political characteristics” meant to protect the country from the wrongdoings of its highest officials.
“To suggest that a legislative enactment (a statute) can frustrate a core constitutional function (impeachment) is to turn the hierarchy of laws on its head,” he said.
As the body vested with the exclusive power to initiate impeachment cases, Sta. Maria said the House also has the authority to determine how accountability is upheld in its proceedings. This includes the power to issue subpoenas.
“When the Committee issues a subpoena for AMLC records, it is not acting as a mere statutory agency; it is performing a sovereign function. It is a textually demonstrable constitutional commitment,” he stressed.
The former law dean also argued that constitutional necessity should override any irregularity or technical violation of regular laws. In other words, he said, a minor procedural irregularity gets “cured” when the purpose is to uphold that higher constitutional value.
The mere principle of “public office is a public trust” should take priority, regardless of whether there were mistakes in handling any data presented to the Committee on Justice.
To illustrate his point, Sta. Maria cited the Estrada v. Escritor ruling, in which the Supreme Court recognized that a constitutional right—in that case, a religious belief—could prevail over statutory law and shield an individual from administrative and criminal liability.
“If the Constitution can carve out an exception for the private conscience of a court interpreter, how much more must it carve out an exception for the collective conscience of the nation in an impeachment hearing?” he asked.
“If an act—be it the revelation of bank data or the breach of a privacy protocol—is justified by the higher Constitutional purpose of preserving the integrity of the State and preventing impunity with respect to a constitutional ground to conduct impeachment hearing, then the irregularity—if there is any—under the statute vanishes,” Sta. Maria added.
For these reasons, he said the members of the Committee on Justice should be immune from regular criminal and civil courts when they’re acting in good faith to perform their constitutional and sovereign mandate in the impeachment proceedings
“Even if the interpretation of the interplay between AMLA and other laws like the Bank Secrecy Law were eventually deemed erroneous, an honest error in the pursuit of a Constitutional sovereign duty does not constitute a crime,” Sta. Maria added.
He further warned that the constant threat of criminal complaints against lawmakers for simply doing their jobs would create a chilling effect on their ability to investigate corruption and ultimately render the power of impeachment meaningless if statutory technicalities prevail over constitutional mandates.
After all, Sta. Maria stressed, the AMLA was enacted to combat money laundering, and not to serve as a legal shield for public officials from investigating them in impeachment proceedings.
“The AMLA was designed to catch criminals; it was never intended to be a shield for those being held to account by the Constitution itself. The hierarchy of our laws, the accountability of public officers is a supreme value that no statute can diminish,” he said.
At the April 22 impeachment hearing, the AMLC revealed that Duterte and her husband’s bank accounts had been flagged for P6.77 billion in covered and suspicious transactions since 2006, with a net inflow of P2.88 billion.
None of those figures, however, are reflected in the vice president’s Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs), where she declared a net worth of only P88.5 million in 2024.
Even with this observation alone, many justice committee members believe there is enough reason to find probable cause to the allegation of unexplained wealth.
