An Act Requiring All Constituent Local Government Units in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region to Allocate an Adequate Land Space for the Establishment of a Bangsamoro Public Cemetery, Providing for Its Guidelines, and for Other Purposes

This requires every local government in the region to set aside land for a public cemetery, and it sets the ratio.

The allocation is a minimum of 2,000 square meters per 1,000 population, to be incorporated into the local government's Comprehensive Land Use Plan or zoning ordinance and approved by its Sanggunian. And 20% of the land allocated must be set aside for use by non-Muslims.

Design is not left open. Registration requirements and the mandated design parameters and road specifications — burial plot sizes, access to plots, the circulation system, service utilities, buffer strip, facilities and amenities, and the perimeter fence — must comply with HLURB Board Resolution No. 681, Series of 2002, and other pertinent rules.

Local governments establish, maintain and operate the cemeteries and ensure compliance with design, sanitation and safety standards, while control and supervision of construction, operations and maintenance rests with the Ministry of the Interior and Local Government. The appropriation covers capital outlay, maintenance, operating expenses and personnel services.

Burial is a religious obligation with a short deadline. Islamic practice requires interment as soon as possible after death, which means a family cannot wait while a plot is found or a fee negotiated — and in a region where public cemetery provision is uneven, that pressure falls hardest on those who cannot pay for a private plot.

Setting a population-based ratio turns an intermittent local decision into a planning requirement, and putting it in the Comprehensive Land Use Plan means the land is reserved before it is built on.

The 20% set-aside for non-Muslims is the provision that matters most and the one that will be read in 2 ways. On its face it guarantees burial space to Christians, indigenous peoples and others in a Muslim-majority region where a public cemetery would otherwise follow Islamic practice — which is a real protection, and consistent with the instinct that runs through this registry, where the Kulliyyah for Islamic Studies is told it may not discriminate on religion and the tribal university must be open to all. Read the other way, a fixed fifth is a quota that could be above or below the actual need in any given municipality, and the bill applies the same proportion to a town that is 2% non-Muslim and one that is 40%.

Adopting the HLURB design standards is the unglamorous decision that makes the Act work. Cemetery design is a public health matter — plot depth and spacing, drainage, the buffer strip between graves and groundwater — and a statute that required cemeteries without specifying standards would produce burial grounds that contaminate wells. Incorporating an existing national resolution rather than drafting fresh parameters is also the right method: the standards already exist and have been applied.

The ratio is the provision a planner would question. Two thousand square meters per 1,000 people, allocated once, is a stock being drawn down by a flow — a municipality's cemetery need accumulates every year while the land allocation does not. The bill ties the allocation to the Comprehensive Land Use Plan, which is periodically revised, so the mechanism for topping it up exists; nothing in the Act requires the revision to do so.

Including personnel services in the appropriation is worth noting because so few bills here do. A cemetery requires someone to dig, record and maintain, and a capital outlay that buys land and a fence without funding a caretaker produces exactly the neglected ground the bill is trying to prevent.