An Act to Promote and Protect the Rights of Human Rights Defenders in the Bangsamoro Region

This is a Bangsamoro Human Rights Defenders Act: 52 sections across 6 chapters, enumerating what a human rights defender may do, what the state must do about it, and what happens when the state does the opposite.

The definition is deliberately wide. A human rights defender is any person who, alone or with others, acts or seeks to act to protect, promote or strive for human rights and fundamental freedoms at local, national, regional or international level — and any bona fide member of a human rights organization is one by definition. A human rights organization may be formal or informal. A human rights violation is defined to cover acts by State actors and by non-State actors acting under their orders or with their acquiescence.

Chapter II enumerates the rights: to promote and protect human rights; to form groups and associations; to solicit, receive and use resources; to seek, receive and disseminate information; to develop and advocate human rights ideas; to communicate with non-governmental and governmental bodies; to access and cooperate with international bodies; to participate in public affairs; to peaceful assembly; to represent and advocate; to freedom of movement; to privacy; against intimidation or reprisal; against defamation, stigmatization and vilification; to exercise cultural rights; to an effective remedy and full reparation; and to establish a sanctuary for human rights victims and their families. Section 23 then sets the limits on those rights.

Chapter III is the half that binds the government, and it reads as a list of the things that go wrong. Obligations to respect, promote, protect and fulfil defenders' rights; to facilitate their work; to provide free access to human rights materials; not to disclose confidential sources; to prevent and protect against intimidation or reprisal, and to penalize it; to refrain from derogatory and unfounded labeling; to protect against arbitrary or unlawful intrusion; not to participate in violations; to investigate whenever there is reasonable ground; to ensure effective remedy and full reparation; to ensure non-recurrence; to enforce and institutionalize command responsibility; to adopt human rights-based governance; to strengthen the protection programme of the Bangsamoro Human Rights Commission; and to promote human rights education.

Chapter IV creates a Human Rights Defenders Protection Committee with stated qualifications, terms of office and functions, and requires training and vetting of everyone involved in it. Chapter V penalises violations and makes any violation of the Act an aggravating circumstance, with the Revised Penal Code applying suppletorily.

Section 3 sets the interpretive rule: all provisions are to be construed in favour of human rights defenders.

Human rights work in the Philippines carries a documented occupational risk, and the particular mechanisms are what the bill's obligations track one by one. Defenders are labelled as fronts for armed movements, surveilled, sued, refused access to detainees, and in the worst cases killed — and the people who order it are rarely the people who do it.

Congress has repeatedly considered a national Human Rights Defenders Act and never passed one. A region with its own legislative power, its own human rights commission under BAA 4, and a recent history in which both State forces and armed groups committed violations, is the one jurisdiction in the country positioned to enact one for itself.

Section 30 is the provision that would matter most in practice, and its plain words are worth keeping: an obligation on public authorities to refrain from derogatory and unfounded labeling. In the Philippines that practice has a name — red-tagging, the public identification of activists, lawyers, journalists and aid workers as fronts for armed movements — and its consequence is that the people named become targets for someone else. No national statute prohibits it. A regional act that makes it a breach of a defined obligation, with violations serving as an aggravating circumstance under Section 46, is the most concrete legal response to it anywhere in Philippine law.

Command responsibility in Section 36 is the other provision of real consequence. The pattern in the documented cases is that the person who pulls the trigger is unidentifiable and the person who created the conditions is untouchable; a duty to enforce and institutionalize command responsibility is aimed squarely at the second. Whether a regional statute can impose that on national uniformed services is the same question this registry raises about the indigenous peoples act and national permits, and the bill asserts past it rather than addressing it.

The definitional breadth is a deliberate choice with a real trade-off. Making any bona fide member of a human rights organization a defender, and recognising informal organizations, means protection does not depend on accreditation by the state that may be the threat — which is the right instinct. It also means the category is wide, and a government inclined to resist the Act has an obvious argument about who qualifies. Section 3's rule that everything is construed in favour of defenders is the answer the drafters chose.

The context makes this bill more notable, not less. The region's own transitional justice measures — Bill No. 21's documentation of violations by State actors and State-affiliated armed groups, and Bill No. 22's disqualification of veterans convicted of gross violations — are about what was done in the past. This one is about what is being done now, and it binds the region's own authorities rather than the national government's. Filed in October 2022, it has not moved past Committee Stage in 4 years, which is itself a datum about the appetite for it.