Ask the Dean: He’s been there before

Long before the International Criminal Court (ICC) became a flashpoint in Philippine politics, and before the country’s most combustible impeachment battles consumed public discourse, Atty. Amado D. Valdez was already doing what he has always done: reading the Constitution with a surgeon’s precision, and speaking his mind with a professor’s candor.

A graduate of the University of the East (UE) College of Law (Class of 1969), Valdez would eventually return to the institution that shaped him not once, but twice as its dean, first in 2000, and again from 2005 to 2014.

Between those terms, his career spans a record few Filipino lawyers can claim: Government Corporate Counsel with the rank of presiding justice of the Court of Appeals, member of the board of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage Systems, senior executive in charge of enforcing the Visiting Forces Agreement, and eventually chairman of the Social Security System under President Rodrigo Duterte.

He was also honored as one of UE’s 60 Most Outstanding Alumni at the university’s Diamond Jubilee in 2006.

But it is perhaps in the arena of constitutional commentary, as a talking head on radio, as a panelist in studios, and as a voice the press reaches for whenever the Republic faces a legal earthquake, that Valdez has made his most lasting mark on the national conversation.

In an era when legalese is routinely weaponized for political ends, his willingness to call things what they are, wherever the chips may fall, has made him one of the country’s most sought-after constitutionalists.

Valdez will be the Daily Tribune’s resource person when the explosive impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte at the Senate court starts.

ICC jurisdiction debate

When the ICC launched a preliminary examination into the Philippines’ drug war in February 2018, the Duterte administration responded swiftly, withdrawing the country from the Rome Statute the following month, with the exit taking legal effect in March 2019. For many Duterte allies, that withdrawal was the end of the matter. For Valdez, it was more complicated.

Valdez argued that the ICC had no jurisdiction to investigate Duterte, claiming that the official withdrawal from the Rome Statute in March 2019 effectively stripped the court of authority over actions taken thereafter.

He also characterized the push by then-ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda as “perhaps politically motivated,” noting that the prosecutor appeared to rely heavily on news reports and what she called “publicly available documents.” Valdez further pointed to the existence of a functioning judicial system in the Philippines, capable, he argued, of handling complaints about government abuses without foreign intervention.

His early stance aligned with the nationalist argument that had been a cornerstone of the Duterte administration’s defense: that the Philippines is a sovereign state with its own courts and that jurisdiction under the Rome Statute evaporates upon withdrawal.

History, however, has since taken a different course. In October 2025, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I rejected the defense’s jurisdictional challenge in the case of The Prosecutor v. Rodrigo Roa Duterte, finding that the court retained authority over alleged crimes committed on Philippine territory between 1 November 2011 and 16 March 2019, the period when the Philippines was still a Rome Statute signatory.

The ruling held that states cannot use withdrawal as a retroactive shield against accountability for crimes already under examination.

On 22 April 2026, the ICC’s Appeals Chamber confirmed this jurisdictional ruling by majority, rejecting the defense’s appeal outright. Less than 24 hours later, Pre-Trial Chamber I unanimously confirmed all three counts of crimes against humanity against Duterte and committed his case to trial.

The sequence of rulings has forced a fresh reckoning for every legal commentator, Valdez among them, who had argued that withdrawal foreclosed the ICC’s reach.

What distinguishes Valdez from mere polemicists, however, is that his early skepticism was not simply cheerleading for a patron. His concern about political motivation behind the initial probe, and his emphasis on the complementarity principle, the idea that the ICC should only step in when domestic systems fail, reflect a coherent legal philosophy.

These are live questions that even international legal scholars continue to debate, as evidenced by ongoing academic literature on what some now call the “legacy jurisdiction” of the ICC over post-withdrawal states.

From Estrada to Sara Duterte

If the ICC question reveals Valdez’s international law instincts, the impeachment debates have displayed his mastery of constitutional mechanics and his flair for translating arcane procedure into political reality.

Valdez is no stranger to the impeachment process from the inside. He served as one of the private prosecutors in the landmark impeachment trial of former President Joseph Estrada, the only Philippine impeachment that reached a full Senate trial before Estrada was ousted by People Power II in January 2001. That experience gives his commentary a texture that purely academic voices cannot match.

When former Chief Justice Renato Corona faced the Senate in 2012, Valdez offered sharp analysis, arguing that the prosecution’s decision to introduce the Basa-Guidote Enterprises Inc. (BGEI) case was the turning point that sealed Corona’s fate — not primarily because it proved the property charges, but because it revealed character. “They shouldn’t have presented the BGEI case,” Valdez said, “because it opened a small window to look into his personality.”

When the senator-judges saw how the BGEI had allegedly been taken from the Basa family through high-handed legal maneuvering, Valdez observed, Corona’s credibility with the court collapsed. Corona was subsequently convicted.

It was the Sara Duterte impeachment saga of 2025, however, that offered Valdez his most elaborate recent canvas.

Speaking in an exclusive interview on the Daily Tribune’s Usapang OFW, Valdez, drawing on his experience as a private prosecutor in the Estrada trial, characterized the Vice President’s impeachment as something larger than a legal proceeding.

He argued it could become a referendum on Sara Duterte’s fitness for the presidency, given her widely reported ambitions for 2028.

The trial, he noted, would offer insights into her character, during which every statement, every piece of evidence, and every procedural move would be scrutinized not just by senator-judges but by the broader electorate.

Valdez also weighed in on the procedural chaos that attended the impeachment’s early stages. When the Senate initially “remanded” the complaint to the House — a move critics called a delaying tactic — Valdez was characteristically precise: “I think the word ‘remand’ is a misnomer,” he said.

The Senate was not technically remanding anything in a judicial sense; it was asking the House to certify that it was still pursuing the case. He acknowledged uncertainty about whether the delay was deliberate, but noted the strategic implications: each hearing, each procedural move, each public statement shapes how the accused is perceived in the broader court of public opinion, not merely by the senator-judges.

On whether the Ombudsman could simultaneously pursue charges before the Sandiganbayan and an impeachment case before the House, Valdez offered a clear-eyed answer that cut through the partisan noise: both proceedings can run concurrently, but criminal proceedings would likely be suspended while the impeachment case is pending.

Citing the Estrada precedent, he reminded his audience that the criminal case was filed before the Sandiganbayan only after the impeachment proceedings concluded. “You have to remove her first before you can go ahead with the criminal case,” he said, applying the same logic to Sara Duterte.

The VP Duterte impeachment of 2025 would ultimately be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in a 13-0 ruling on 25 July 2025 — struck down on the one-year rule under Article XI, Section 3(5) of the Constitution, and for violations of due process. A second impeachment followed in 2026, with the House voting anew to impeach her in May of that year.

Voice that keeps returning

What emerges from the body of Atty. Amado Valdez’s public commentary is not a simple ideological profile. He is not reducible to a Duterte apologist, nor to a reformist critic. He is something rarer: a lawyer who follows the argument where it leads, even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable, and who regards the Constitution not as a document to be deployed strategically but as a covenant to be honored consistently.

Whether his early ICC skepticism will be revisited in light of the court’s definitive jurisdictional rulings remains to be seen. What is clear is that the debates he has shaped — about sovereignty, accountability, the limits of impeachment, the interplay of domestic and international justice — are not merely academic. They are the debates on which the Republic’s credibility, both at home and before the world, will ultimately be judged.

For a man who introduced mock Bar Examinations at UE to sharpen his students’ legal instincts, perhaps that is the deepest lesson of all: the law is not a shield. It is a mirror. And in Valdez’s long career, there is no shortage of reasons to look into it.