An Act to Recognize, Develop, and Protect the Indigenous Peoples and Their Rights in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, Strengthening the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples' Affairs, Appropriating Funds Therefor and for Other Purposes

This is the region's indigenous peoples' code — a hundred and 6 sections replacing the ARMM-era Tribal Peoples Rights Act, and by some distance the most consequential land law in the registry.

It begins by making ancestral domains permanently unsellable. Not merely protected: held in perpetuity, and incapable of transfer to any local government, agency, official, corporation or individual. Ancestral lands within them may change hands only among members of the tribe, and everything else is void. Where land already went to an outsider through vitiated consent or at an unconscionable price, the family may redeem it for 15 years.

Then it puts a gate in front of every permit. No ministry or agency may issue, renew or grant a concession, license, lease or production-sharing agreement, or carry out any project, without a certification from the indigenous peoples' ministry that the area does not overlap an ancestral domain — and that certification cannot issue without the community's consent. Nor may any new concession issue at all while a domain claim is still pending. A pending claim becomes, in effect, a moratorium.

The governance provisions are equally direct. Every LGU with ancestral land in it — titled or not — must seat an indigenous mandatory representative chosen by the community's own council, and installing them is “mandatory and ministerial”: interfering in their selection is unlawful, and refusing to install them is a sanctionable offence. Where a population is at least 5% indigenous, a Deputy Governor or Deputy Mayor must be appointed too. Customary law decides land, property, succession and family disputes first, and any ambiguity is resolved in the community's favor.

On money: no less than 10% of the revenue from resources in the domain, paid directly to the community, and royalties of at least 1% of gross income from any outside operator. On land the army holds: the community is declared the owner of the parts of its domain occupied by military camps. And behind all of it, a ₱200 million Ancestral Domain Fund for delineation, titling, redemption and compensation.

The Organic Law promised recognition of indigenous rights, the ARMM-era statute had been overtaken, and the region's largest ancestral domain claims — above all the Téduray Lambangian claim — had been sitting unresolved with the national commission. Section 102 is blunt about the remedy: within 90 days, those pending applications come home to the regional ministry “for immediate action”.

Section 86 is the load-bearing wall of this act, and it is worth reading twice. Every ministry, agency, office “and other national governmental agencies” is strictly enjoined from issuing, renewing or granting any concession, license or lease, entering any production-sharing agreement, or carrying out any project without prior certification from the regional ministry. No certification without consent. No new concession at all while a domain application is pending. And under Section 69(i), once an area is certified, notification to the other ministries “shall terminate any legal basis for the jurisdiction previously claimed”. Taken together, that is not a consultation requirement — it is a transfer of gatekeeping authority over land, and it converts an unresolved claim into a freeze on new grants. Whether a regional act can bind *national* agencies this way is a genuine question the text simply asserts past, and it is the provision most likely to be tested.

The second thing to notice is that this act refuses the usual Philippine division between “indigenous peoples” and “Moros”. National practice treats those as separate categories with separate agencies; here the Badjao, Sama Dilaut, Jama Mapun, Sama Banguingui and Sama Pangutaran are named in the coverage clause, “Marginalized Moro Peoples or Communities” gets its own definition, and the act builds a Sama Center for them alongside the Banobo Center memorialising Mamalu and Tabunaway. The political architecture is deliberate: the entire territory is declared the shared homeland of all peoples with precolonial ties, within which distinct domains sit. It is a framing designed to make indigenous land claims something other than a Moro-versus-IP contest — which is exactly what they have often become.

The most quietly radical clause is Section 9(h): the right to regulate the entry of migrants, “including the right to review, assess, and renegotiate the terms of entry of existing migrants and organizations”. That is not prospective. It reaches settler families resident inside domains for generations, and it is the land question of Mindanao compressed into a single sentence. The act provides no procedure for that renegotiation, no standard, and no consequence if it fails. Read next to Section 73 — legitimately vested property rights are respected — the two provisions sit in an unresolved tension that the implementing rules, or a court, will have to settle.

And then there is Section 56, which reads like a scar. Indigenous Cultural Guardians are recognized, and immediately required to be civilian, unarmed, and never conscripted as an extension of the armed forces, the police, or any non-state armed group “at any point in time”. Section 9(f) forbids recruiting community members into the armed forces against their will “and in particular, for use against other ICCs/IPs”, and forbids recruiting their children under any circumstances. The history behind those clauses is decades of indigenous communities being armed as auxiliaries and set against each other. A statute that takes the trouble to prohibit that by name is telling you what it is trying to stop.

What remains uncertain is capacity. Delineation here is evidence-heavy and slow — census, perimeter survey, native-language publication, radio broadcast where there is no newspaper, opposition windows, cross-verification with three agencies and the Registry of Deeds — and ₱200 million must cover delineation, titling, redemption *and* compensation for expropriated land across the whole region. The rights arrive on day one; the titles that make them enforceable will take considerably longer.