An Act Establishing a Bangsamoro Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Program, Creating for This Purpose the Bangsamoro Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Commission, Appropriating Funds Therefor, and for Other Purposes

This is the act that finally builds something to act on the 2016 TJRC Reports — the transitional justice study the peace agreement called for, delivered a decade ago and left largely on the shelf.

It creates an independent five-member commission with a seven-year life and real investigative powers: it can summon witnesses, administer oaths, compel documents by subpoena, and hold people in contempt for defying it. It is also deliberately freed from “the usual formalities of law and judicial processes”, so a survivor can testify in a community listening session without a lawyer and without the evidentiary apparatus of a courtroom.

The mandate has three components. Human rights violations are documented from the American period up to the ratification of the Organic Law in 2019, with testimony, historical records and forensic evidence gathered in preparation for possible prosecution or reparation claims. Land dispossession is mapped from the Treaty of Paris in 1898 to the present — and the act's definition is unusually honest, reaching loss “by force, coercion, fraud, or ostensible lawful means”, which is to say the homestead and titling laws that were perfectly legal and still took the land. Third is history, memory and truth: an archive, an official published narration, physical and digital museums, memorials to the martyrs of the struggle, and the historical injustices written into the school curriculum with the education ministry.

It gets ₱150 million to start from the Chief Minister's Contingent Fund, fiscal autonomy, and a budget floor: its appropriation cannot be cut below the previous year's. It meets every Tuesday. It reports annually to both the Bangsamoro Parliament and the Philippine Congress.

Transitional justice was promised in the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro and written into the Organic Law. The TJRC delivered its reports in 2016 and recommended a national program. That national program still did not exist when this act was passed — Section 27 says so, in the conditional: “upon the creation of the transitional justice and reconciliation program for the Bangsamoro at the national level”. This is the regional government doing what it can within its own jurisdiction, and building a record to hand over if and when Manila builds the counterpart.

The act's power and its limit sit in the same sentence structure, repeated throughout Section 9: the Commission may *investigate, study, and recommend*. It can compel a corporation to produce fifty-year-old land records and punish refusal as contempt — and then it can recommend that somebody else do something about what those records show. Prosecution, compensation, restitution, institutional reform, vetting and lustration are all listed in Section 9(o) as gaps the Commission identifies “for the Philippine Government to adopt”. Nothing in the act obliges anyone to adopt them. That is not a drafting oversight; it is the boundary of what a regional legislature can do about crimes committed by a national state, and the act is candid about it.

Two asymmetries in the mandate are worth noticing, because they will shape what the record ends up containing. The first is temporal: land dispossession runs “to the present”, while human rights violations stop at the ratification of the Organic Law in 2019. Everything after 2019 — including anything done under the Bangsamoro Government's own watch — falls outside the human rights component. The second is definitional. Section 3 defines human rights violations broadly enough to include those “independently committed by non-state actors”, but the proviso in Section 7(a) narrows the covered violations to those that are emblematic or that resulted from “the imposition of a monolithic Filipino identity and a centralized Philippine State”. Read together, violence between Moro groups, rido, and abuses by the revolutionary fronts themselves are defined as human rights violations but sit awkwardly against the component that documents them. A commission that intends to reconcile communities to each other, and not only the region to Manila, will have to work out what to do with that.

The membership rule deserves the same plain reading. Every commissioner must be a descendant of native inhabitants of the Bangsamoro, or married to one. Given the mandate — a body speaking for peoples dispossessed in their own homeland — the logic is clear, and the reserved seats for an NMIP representative, two women, two island-province residents and an alim in Shari'ah show real care about who gets counted as native. But settler communities are also parties to the land question, they hold voting ex-officio seats on the Youth and Women Commissions, and the CSO Forum's participation guarantee in Section 19 names Moro and NMIP organizations only. A truth process that will publish an official narration of how land moved to “private corporations and individuals, largely from outside the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region” has, structurally, no settler voice inside it.

What the act does get emphatically right is durability. 7 years extendable to ten, a budget floor that forbids next year's appropriation from falling below this year's, automatic release, salaries that cannot be cut, commissioners serving the full life of the body rather than fixed terms, weekly meetings, published thematic reports and a public terminal report, annual reporting to two legislatures, and an archive that passes to the Bangsamoro Library Archives when the Commission dissolves. Truth commissions usually die of budget starvation and quiet neglect long before their mandates end. This one has been drafted by people who evidently knew that.