An Act Protecting the Rights of Internally Displaced Persons of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, Providing Mechanisms Therefor and for Other Purposes

This is the cabinet's bill on internal displacement, and it is the most substantial thing in the registry on the subject. It writes the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement into Bangsamoro law, sets out what an internally displaced person is entitled to, and builds a standing structure to deliver it.

The rights section is the core. During and after displacement, and without discrimination on any of a long list of grounds, the Bangsamoro Government must provide and ensure safe access to essential food and potable water — in conformity with the cultural and religious sensitivities of the displaced — shelter with proper sanitation, adequate clothing and non-food items, and essential medical, dental and psychosocial services. Where designated evacuation centers are full, the government must identify alternative shelter, including privately owned lots and households. Assessments must identify vulnerable populations and people with special health needs.

The bill is deliberately broad about what causes displacement. It covers armed conflict, but also clan war — defined in terms of retaliatory violence between families and kinship groups, which is rido named in law — disasters, and what it calls the aggressive implementation of development projects, meaning forced displacement in the name of growth, with legitimate resettlement expressly carved out.

The machinery is a Bangsamoro Internal Displacement Coordinating Council chaired by the Minister of Social Services and Development with the Minister of the Interior and Local Government as vice-chair, sitting alongside eight ministries and offices, the Bangsamoro Darul Ifta, the police regional office, every provincial government, Cotabato City, a Special Geographic Area representative, a representative of the Office of the Bangsamoro Settlers, four civil society observers and one from the private sector. Under it sit local internal displacement councils and a Bangsamoro Internal Displacement Management and Monitoring Office in MSSD. The Act also provides for a regional plan, an early recovery plan, mechanisms for international humanitarian assistance, and duty treatment for imported relief goods.

The declaration of policy grounds it in the Constitution, international human rights and humanitarian standards, the UN Guiding Principles, treaties the Philippines has adhered to, and existing Philippine law, and commits the Bangsamoro Government to a rights-based approach and to pursuing durable solutions rather than indefinite camps. It also requires the region to harmonise its own legal measures on displacement with this Act, which is an admission that they were not harmonised.

The context is not stated in the text and does not need to be. This is a region where the 2017 Marawi siege displaced roughly 200,000 people, where flooding and rido displace communities in the Maguindanao lowlands most years, and where the national IDP bill has repeatedly failed to become law.

Two things stand out, and the first is the clock.

This is a Government of the Day bill — a cabinet measure, with the executive behind it — filed in September 2022, five years after the Marawi siege. It reached the period of amendments in September 2024 and the index has not moved it since. A rights statute for displaced people has now been pending longer than most displacements it would govern.

The second is that the bill has aged out from under itself in one specific way. Its Council roster names the provincial government of Sulu as a member. The Supreme Court removed Sulu from the Bangsamoro in 2024 — the same year the bill sat in interpellation — so the composition as filed seats a province that is no longer in the region. That is fixable in the period of amendments the bill is currently in, and it is exactly the kind of thing that period is for.

A drafting note on top of that: Section 14 creates and consistently names the Bangsamoro Internal Displacement Management and Monitoring Office, the BIDMMO. Twice — in the early recovery plan section and again in the appropriations — the text instead says "RIDMO", an acronym the bill never defines. It reads as a survival from an earlier draft in which the office was regional rather than Bangsamoro, and anyone reading the funding clause should know the two names refer to the same office.