An Act Granting Government Officials and Employees of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao a Thirty (30) Calendar Days Paid Leave to Perform Pilgrimage and Appropriating Funds Therefor

This grants Bangsamoro officials and employees 30 calendar days of paid leave to perform a pilgrimage, once in a lifetime. Parliament passed it on 16 July 2026 as Bangsamoro Autonomy Act No. 94, with the leave cut to at most 22 working days.

Eligibility turns on service: an aggregate of 2 years with the Bangsamoro government qualifies, and the leave may be taken only once regardless of which office in the region the employee works in at the time of application. Pilgrimage is defined broadly — visiting a place of religious or spiritual importance to perform acts of worship or a spiritual journey — without naming any faith.

The approval chain is where this bill does its real work, and it runs to the top. The Chief Minister approves applications on the favorable recommendation of the head of office. Parliament's own staff go to the Speaker instead. Local government employees are recommended by their local chief executive and then sent to the Chief Minister through the Ministry of the Interior and Local Government. Every application reaches the Office of the Chief Minister, which keeps the record of everyone in the region who has taken the leave, local governments included. A head of office may refuse to recommend an application if granting it would seriously hamper operations.

2 provisions have no counterpart in the competing bill. Section 7 requires anyone who takes the leave to submit a written report on the pilgrimage they performed, within 30 days of returning to work. Section 8 makes an employee who deliberately did not perform the pilgrimage despite taking the leave subject to administrative sanctions and penalties.

The money goes in the budget of the Office of the Chief Minister, and that office and the Civil Service Commission jointly write the rules within 90 days.

There is no explanatory note attached to the filed copy. Section 2 states the policy in 2 sentences: the Bangsamoro Government exercises its powers to promote the general welfare, and it "realizes the role of a strong and contented workforce in achieving a developed Bangsamoro region".

That is a workforce argument rather than a religious one, and it is the only case the document makes for itself. The bill carries 29 co-authors on its face, which is the other thing it offers in place of a note.

Sections 7 and 8 are what distinguish this bill, and they are worth stating plainly: an employee who takes this leave must afterwards file a written account of their pilgrimage with the Office of the Chief Minister, and one who deliberately did not perform it faces administrative sanctions. The state is verifying an act of worship. There is a defensible reason — 30 days of paid absence is public money, and a benefit without a check invites the obvious abuse — but the check chosen puts a government office in the position of assessing whether someone's devotional journey really happened. The competing bill, which grants half the days and says nothing about pay, needs no such apparatus.

The approval chain compounds it. Every application in the region, from every ministry and every local government unit, lands on the Chief Minister's desk. For a benefit of this kind the natural approver is the employee's own agency head, and this bill makes that person a recommender only. What the design produces is a single regional register of which public servants have made a pilgrimage and when — a document that does not otherwise exist and that the bill does not say who may see.

Set against Bill No. 276, the 2 measures differ in nearly every parameter: 30 days against 15, paid against unstated, 2 years of service against none, a named approval chain against none, and a sanction against nothing. What they share is the vocabulary of accommodation, and where 276 writes religious neutrality into its operative text by naming both Muslim and Christian destinations, this one achieves neutrality by naming nothing at all — a pilgrimage is any journey to a place of religious or spiritual importance.

The path through Parliament was the same for both. Filed 5 February 2024, First Reading on 29 February, referred to the Committee on Rules in June 2024, and then nothing until Committee Report No. 176 took this bill and 276 together on 19 November 2025. 17 deferrals followed across 20 months before Third and Final Reading on 16 July 2026.

A note on the act number. Parliament's bills index records this measure as becoming BAA 94, and the enacted text published in August 2026 confirms it: BAA 94 is the Pilgrimage Leave Act of 2026. Parliament's acts index gives BAA 94 the title of BAA 93, the Special Geographic Area Development Authority act, and that entry is wrong. What follows is the bill as filed, not the law; the reading of BAA 94 sets out what the enacted text changed.