Malacañang turned the tables on Vice President Sara Duterte on Thursday, questioning whether her own inaction — not the administration’s — amounted to a failure of duty in the lead-up to the Middle East crisis.
Palace communications undersecretary Claire Castro raised the legal concept of nonfeasance after Duterte accused the Marcos government of being unprepared for the regional conflict. Castro argued that if the Vice President had prior knowledge of the looming crisis as far back as 2022, she had an obligation to act on it.
“If she already knew about it as early as 2022 and didn’t even mention it directly to our fellow citizens, then who is the one who didn’t do their job? Who did nothing?” Castro said in Filipino. “Let us remember, she is boasting that she had information about this—wasn’t it her obligation as Vice President to inform the authorities so that our fellow citizens, as she herself said, could at least prepare?”
Castro was direct about the implications: “If she didn’t say this, then this is definitely a breach of public trust. We have what we call nonfeasance—government officials who fail to perform their duties.”
Central to the Palace’s line of questioning is whether Duterte ever formally brought her concerns to the Department of National Defense. Castro said the Vice President needs to answer that specifically.
“Because if she already knew about this, probably using her own crystal ball, she should have informed whether it was verified information coming from her—she should have immediately reported it to the country, to the President, and to the authorities,” Castro said.
Duterte had made her remarks in Davao City, where she told reporters that warnings of a potential regional war in 2025 had been in circulation years earlier among foreign government observers, but that no preventive steps were taken by the administration.
“We’ve already seen that among many observers, especially those from foreign governments, who have been looking at the possibility of a war in 2025,” she said in Filipino.
This is not her first public salvo against the government’s handling of the crisis. Duterte had also recently suggested that aircraft repatriation of overseas Filipinos from the conflict zone was not a complicated undertaking, citing a source she declined to name. Castro dismissed that claim, saying responsible leadership requires decisions grounded in “facts, situations, and the conditions of stakeholders” — not secondhand accounts.
