Impeachment is a process by which a legislative body or other legally constituted tribunal initiates charges against a public official for misconduct. It may be understood as a unique process involving both political and legal elements.
Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff (left) and South Korean president Park Geun-hye (right) were both impeached and removed from office in 2016 and 2017, respectively.
Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas was the first European head of state to have been impeached.
Boris Yeltsin, as president of Russia, survived several impeachment attempts.
The impeachment trial of United States president Bill Clinton in 1999, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist presiding. The House managers are seated beside the quarter-circular tables on the left and the president's personal counsel on the right, much in the fashion of United States president Andrew Johnson's trial in 1868.
A legislature is a deliberative assembly with the legal authority to make laws for a political entity such as a country, nation or city. They are often contrasted with the executive and judicial powers of government. Legislatures can exist at different levels of government–national, state/provincial/regional, local, even supranational. Countries differ as to what extent they grant deliberative assemblies at the subnational law-making power, as opposed to purely administrative responsibilities.
United States Capitol building, where the legislature of the United States, the United States Congress, meets, located in Washington, DC
The Congress of the Republic of Peru, the country's national legislature, meets in the Legislative Palace in 2010.
The German Bundestag, its theoretical lower house
The Australian Senate, its upper house
