An Act Strengthening the Regional Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Program, Creating the Regional Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Commission for the Bangsamoro, and Appropriating Funds Therefor

This is MP Laisa Alamia's bill on transitional justice, and it is the measure that became BAA 89 — three years and four months after it was filed. It builds two things: a Regional Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Program, and a Commission to design and run it.

The definitions carry more weight than the machinery. Historical injustice is defined to cover acts and transactions by state *and* non-state actors that placed the Bangsamoro and other inhabitants of the Mindanao and Sulu archipelago at a political and economic disadvantage and that, while they occurred in the past, continue to impact their lives today. Land dispossession is defined to include dispossession "by ostensibly lawful means, such as public land laws" — attended by force, duress, intimidation, stealth and deception. That single clause is the bill's sharpest sentence: it names the homestead and titling statutes that were legal on their face and still transferred the land.

The Commission is a chairperson and 4 commissioners appointed by Parliament, with an executive director and 4 civil society representatives sitting as non-voting members. It may take testimony, receive evidence, administer oaths, summon witnesses and compel documents by subpoena duces tecum. Four categories of person are disqualified from appointment: anyone found culpable of human rights violations or abuse, anyone sentenced by final judgment for an offense involving moral turpitude, anyone removed from office or suspended for at least a year by disciplinary action in the government or private sector, and fugitives from justice.

Under the Commission sit 4 sub-commissions, one per commissioner. Bangsamoro Historical Memory takes victim testimony in closed or public hearings, with sensitivity to accounts of women who have been victims of gender-based and sexual violence, investigates emblematic cases of mass atrocity crimes, publishes reports, and builds a database of violations from 1948 to the present — including one on conflict-related human casualties. The sub-commission against Impunity coordinates with the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice and may recommend discipline against officials who obstruct investigations. Land Dispossession develops a dispute resolution mechanism covering indigenous peoples' ancestral domain claims and builds a land ownership database from cadastral, geo-tagged and community-based participatory mapping. Healing and Reconciliation identifies and supports traditional community practices of reconciliation.

Appointments run through regional public consultations: Parliament devises the process, a selection committee of regional and local sectoral stakeholders draws up the shortlist, and both the committee and the Commission must include women.

The declaration of policy commits the Bangsamoro Government to pursue normalization and development and to end conflict in the region by promoting peace through justice — addressing legitimate grievances, historical injustices, human rights violations and marginalization through land dispossession, and guaranteeing non-recurrence.

The bill does not argue its own case at length, and it does not have to. Transitional justice was written into the peace agreement, a national study commission reported on it in 2016, and nothing in regional law had been built to act on any of it when this was filed in September 2022.

The calendar is the first thing to read here. The bill was filed on 19 September 2022 and given its First Reading on 28 September 2022. It was then referred to committee on 17 June 2025 — 2 years and 9 months later. Committee Report No. 164 took it up jointly with Bill No. 353 and was adopted on 29 October 2025, after which the measure was deferred on 10 November, 19 November, 9 December, 16 December and 17 December before passing Second Reading on 26 January 2026 and Third and Final Reading two days later as BAA 89. A private member's bill on the region's hardest subject sat at First Reading for most of a parliamentary term, and then moved in 3 months.

What survived the trip is as telling as what took so long. The enacted act reaches much further back than this bill does: the filed version dates its human rights database from 1948, while BAA 89 documents violations from the American period and traces land dispossession to the Treaty of Paris in 1898. The act also gained a fixed 7-year life and the power to punish defiance as contempt — neither of which is in the filed copy. Going the other way, the bill's 4 standing sub-commissions, each with its own commissioner, became 3 mandate components in the act; the sub-commission against impunity, the one pointed at officials rather than at history, is the one that did not survive as a body of its own.

The appointment design is the bill's quiet argument. Commissioners are appointed by Parliament, not the Chief Minister, from a shortlist drawn by a committee of regional and local sectoral stakeholders, after public consultations, with women required on both bodies. For a commission whose subject is what states and armed movements did to people, putting the selection outside the executive and partly outside government altogether is the structural claim the bill is making — and it is made in Section 9, not in the declaration of policy.