An Act Instituting the Administrative Code of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao

This is the organization chart of the Bangsamoro Government, written as law. 7 Books and 20 Titles covering the Wali, the Parliament, the Cabinet, the justice system, 15 ministries, the Office of the Chief Minister and everything attached to it, the intergovernmental machinery with Manila, and the national agencies that continue to operate inside the region.

Much of it is the ordinary furniture of public administration — how ministries relate to their attached agencies, who signs which contract, how administrative issuances are numbered and published. Some of it is quietly useful: every office must keep an official logbook of final acts and decisions, open to the public, and where the timing of an official act is disputed, that logbook controls.

What gives the Code its character are the institutions with no national counterpart. The Bangsamoro Darul-Ifta', headed by the Mufti and seating 6 ulama drawn one from each province and one from the Special Geographic Area, selected by mashuwarah — issuing fatawa, leading inter-religious dialogue, exchanging Ramadan moon-sighting information with neighbouring Southeast Asian Muslim countries, and declaring the start and end of the fast and both Eids. The Bangsamoro Pilgrimage Authority, holding primary jurisdiction over Hajj and Umrah. An Office for Settler Communities headed by settlers. An Office for Other Bangsamoro Communities, for the Bangsamoro who live outside the region entirely.

And then Title XIX, which is the most revealing part of the Code, because of what it does not do.

A government created in 2019 had to be assembled. The Code puts the whole apparatus in one instrument rather than leaving it to executive orders, and fixes in statute both what the region administers and what it merely hosts.

Title XIX is where this Code is most honest about the limits of the autonomy it administers. It does not create a regional police force, a regional jail bureau, a regional fire service or a regional coast guard. It *recognizes* the establishment by the Philippine National Police of a Police Regional Office, by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology of a regional office, by the Bureau of Fire Protection of another, and by the Philippine Coast Guard of another — each under national operational and administrative control. The Chief Minister is consulted on who becomes Police Regional Director, and the National Police Commission “shall consult the Chief Minister on police matters affecting the Police Regional Office”. Consultation is the whole of it. Even the electoral office is a COMELEC unit, funded from COMELEC's budget. For a region whose conflict was fundamentally about who holds coercive power, the administrative code says plainly that the answer remains Manila, and the Bangsamoro Government's role is to be asked.

What the region does hold, it holds distinctively. The Darul-Ifta' provisions are the clearest example — a government office whose head declares when Ramadan begins and ends, coordinates moon-sighting with neighbouring Muslim countries, and issues religious edicts, all within an administrative code that elsewhere concerns itself with procurement services and logbooks. And the Pilgrimage Authority sections read like they were drafted by people who had watched Hajj administration go wrong elsewhere: collections capped at mutawiff and processing fees only, held in a special trust fund, pilgrims guaranteed free choice of travel agency and airline, and a flat prohibition — “In no instance shall the pilgrims be forced to purchase such logistics, materials and supplies from the Authority or its authorized agents.” That last clause exists because somebody, somewhere, was made to.

The peace process surfaces here too, in an unexpected place. Among the Cooperatives and Social Enterprise Authority's functions is promoting cooperatives and social enterprises “as pathways to reintegrate former combatants, surrenderees, and disaster-affected communities”. It is the same instinct that later produced Article 305 of the Civil Service Code reserving entry-level government posts for Mujahideen and Mujahidat: normalization written into whichever body of law happens to be passing at the time.

One structural point deserves flagging. Section 68 gives the Chief Minister continuing authority to reorganize the executive — abolishing, consolidating and merging units, transferring functions, and moving entire agencies between ministries — without returning to Parliament. Set against Book VII's rule that the Code itself may only be amended by an Act of Parliament, the effect is that the words of the Code are protected while the machine it describes can be rearranged at will. That is a common feature of administrative codes, and a real one: the org chart in the statute and the org chart in practice can drift apart without anyone amending a line.