Mr. President:

I rise today, on a matter of the highest personal and collective privilege. I address you for the first time as a Senator of the Republic on a matter that concerns not just the committee I head, but all of us, as a chamber of the legislature. I rise to speak, as well, on behalf of our brothers and sisters who compose the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines whom we are tasked to represent with as much vigor as our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens. I rise to speak in defense of the Constitution that delineates, for all of us, the freedoms to which we are all entitled.

Mr. President, you and my colleagues know that I prefer to listen and learn than to speak. The truth is that I have, until now, deliberately chosen to be silent, not because I have lacked anything to say, but because there is much I still want to know, and learn. My more senior peers in this chamber, Mr. President, with their erudition, experience, and exacting dedication to the principles of public service, demonstrate day after day, in this session hall and in committee meetings, the need to think before acting on any matter.

The time has come to break my silence in this chamber, Mr. President, because there is now before us a challenge. A challenge made on the sly by the executive department. A challenge to the fundamental structure of our constitutional order. A challenge which must be met.

How we choose to meet that challenge is crucial. We have a choice whether to be silent in the face of a calculated assault on the fundamental principles of our republican institutions, or to speak out to condemn that assault. We have a choice whether to be silent accomplices to the erosion of the liberties of our countrymen who belong to the Indigenous Peoples, or to take our mandate as representatives of all the people, and not just the majority, seriously.

Mr. President, I choose to speak out. I choose to break my silence. I choose to take up the challenge.

The Executive Branch, recently, has taken upon itself to undo, by executive fiat, what took ten long years for the Congress of the Philippines to achieve: namely, the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997. When this Act of Congress was signed in 1997, after ten years of difficult and tortuous debates, it earned respect for our country throughout the world. It was hailed as a triumph of political will, a remarkable example of legislation that made possible the rectification of many wrongdoings. It established the principle of collective, and not just personal, ownership of land for communities more concerned with the stewardship of their habitats, rather than its exploitation. The concept of stewardship is something we, the majority have yet to learn.

Mr. President, when Republic Act 8371 was signed, our Indigenous Peoples, and all who have been concerned with according them the dignity and rights commensurate to their own cultures that we, who belong to the dominant Christian and Muslim cultures have long enjoyed, thought that at last, the crooked lines of our past relationships with them could be made straight. Our countrymen who belong to the Indigenous Peoples have endured treatment that was often faithless because it was so contradictory. The Philippine government, at the time of Commonwealth, had embarked on a program of establishing, by presidential proclamation and executive order, an extensive system of national parks and reserves, many of them encompassing the ancestral lands of our indigenous peoples. It was hoped that such a system would protect our environment, preserve our natural patrimony, and prevent outsiders from encroaching on the ancestral domains of our indigenous peoples.

Quezon’s extensive program was undertaken with the legal advice and assistance of my grandfather, Jose Abad Santos, who helped provide the Commonwealth government with the legal tools required to set in place national policies imbued with a sense of Social Justice. He was conscious of the need to protect all, not just some, Filipinos, and the urgency of putting in place a just and humane social order as the Philippines prepared for final independence.

Mr. President, the Second World War claimed my grandfather’s life, which he gladly gave for his country. But it also claimed much of the good work he intended. The destruction of our country and the haphazard economic planning that followed confused plunder with progress. Part of this policy of plunder in the quest of fleeting short-term profits was the steady revocation and amendment of the system of executive issuances that had established a large national parks and protected areas system.

Presidents and Congresses of the Philippines combined to alienate reserved lands in order to make them available for exploitation. Logging and industrial interests profited from this systematic reversal of prewar policies; many grew fantastically wealthy. Where once the law had attempted to preserve the lands in which our Indigenous Peoples live, the law instead became an instrument for their accelerated marginalization and impoverishment.

Mr. President, Republic Act 8371 was meant to put an end to this process of alienation and marginalization. It was the law that was meant not only to rectify old wrongs, but empower our Indigenous Peoples.

In particular, a provision of this law established the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples. Section 40 of Republic Act 8371 stated that this Commission would be independent, under the office of the President of the Philippines. This section gave the Indigenous Peoples of our country a dignity, status, and authority in the national government they had never possessed before.

These terms are essential, Mr. President. The National Commission on Indigenous Peoples conferred dignity because it elevated the concerns of our Indigenous Peoples to the national level. It raised their status because, by having a Chairman answerable only to the President of the Philippines, it firmly established the right of our Indigenous Peoples to decisive, prompt, and continued action on the part of the Executive; it allocated and established, authority, Mr. President, because at long last it placed the identification and protection of ancestral domains in the hands of those it properly belonged. The creation of this Commission, Mr. President, at long last liberated our Indigenous Peoples from second-class status in their own country, both in the eyes of the law and of their countrymen. It placed both the rights and obligations of ancestral domain protection and administration in the hands of those entitled to, and qualified for, it: our Indigenous Peoples. No longer would they be mendicants in their own land. From then on, they would be separate, but equal.

Mr. President, that is the importance of this Commission, and the importance of the law Congress passed to make such a Commission possible.

Now, after two administrations, what has the present administration undertaken? Nothing less, Mr. President, than to reduce once more, our Indigenous Peoples to second class status. The Executive Branch, Mr. President, has undertaken a policy that not only flouts the separation of powers, it demotes and thus, demeans, our Indigenous Peoples in the eyes of the law and their countrymen.

The instrument, of this policy of depriving our Indigenous Peoples of their hard won equality, this policy of stripping them of their hard-won rights, this policy of reducing them to the status of second-class citizens, is an executive order. Executive Order 364, signed on September 27 of this year, has as one of its provisions, the transfer of the Commission on Indigenous Peoples to the Department of Land Reform, created by the same order. Executive Order 364 transforms of the Commission on Indigenous Peoples into a subordinate agency on par with agencies devoted to agrarian and urban land reform. It is this provision, Mr. President, that presents a challenge by the executive branch to our constitution, our congress, and our indigenous peoples.

Mr. President, if the Executive were to suddenly order the transfer of the Commission on Human Rights under the supervision of the Department of National Defense, there would be a massive outpouring of protest and indignation. And rightly so. For the Commission on Human Rights was established under our present Constitution to prevent the abuse of authority and to investigate violations of human rights due to the traumatic experience of martial law. Many would protest such a move due to its patent lack of logic and the psychological and physical scars so many of our countrymen bear to this day.

The decision of the President of the Philippines to place the Commission on Indigenous Peoples under the direct supervision of the Department of Land Reform is a move equally illogical and definitely reprehensible. The Executive Order, in placing under the control of a cabinet official what Congress explicitly envisioned as a national Commission directly under the president, contravenes the will of Congress. The Executive Order, in making the Chairman on Indigenous Peoples a mere ex-officio undersecretary, demotes the Commission on Indigenous Peoples both administratively and morally. The Executive Order, in lumping together the distribution of agrarian and urban lands, with their system of Torrens titles, with the administration of Ancestral Domains subject to an entirely different communal system, has sacrificed the true interests of Social Justice to window-dress the bureaucracy.

The Executive Order, Mr. President, manifests a profound and insulting ignorance of the rights and needs of our Indigenous Peoples. Our farmers, for example, could do well with two hectares and a carabao, but this is not how our indigenous peoples live, or want to live. Social Justice demands that the tillers of our soil be given land to own and till; but Social Justice requires that we do not presume that we can re-allocate what is already theirs by historical birthright. This very assumption, that you can parcel out ancestral lands, can only be made by people who neither understand, nor consult, our Indigenous Peoples. Agrarian and Urban land reform concern the titling, or giving away, of land to the landless; Ancestral Domain management requires, however, the preservation of land to which certain populations are entitled by historic right. Agencies tasked with giving away should not be tasked with the radically different duty of preserving and keeping intact communal lands. The left hand cannot give away what the right hand has been tasked to protect.

As a Senator of this Republic, I ask my colleagues and our countrymen to listen to their kinsmen. The Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines, representatives of whom have signed petitions, and some of whom have taken it upon themselves to be here, oppose and even burned, this Executive Order. They denounce the arbitrary, short-sighted, and insulting demotion of their Commission to a subservient agency of the Department of Land Reform. The fundamental aspirations of Social Justice, Mr. President, which our Constitution ordains as one of the founding principles of our country, require me, and all of us in the Philippine Senate, to denounce this Executive Order as well.

The Senate cannot be supine in the face of Executive encroachment into the powers of Congress. The Senate cannot be a party to the reversal of a just and hard-won policy of empowerment and protection of our Indigenous Peoples. The Senate cannot be an accomplice to the Executive Department’s efforts to return our Indigenous Peoples to the status of inconvenient objects to be shunted aside.

Mr. President, the Executive Department has had neither the courtesy nor the legal sense to consult Congress in the demotion of the Commission on Indigenous Peoples. It has lacked the understanding to realize that what Congress has enacted, the President cannot undo. It betrays a disrespect and lack of dedication to the interests of our Indigenous Peoples. If the Executive has done what it has done, out of a misplaced (because it is fundamentally ignorant) effort to make things better, then it does not know what it is doing. If it has done what it has done, because of contempt for the law, Congress, and our Indigenous Peoples, then it is embarking on a dangerous course of action. Either way, accidentally or intentionally, the Executive is poised to embark on a policy of aggression and exploitation.

In 1997, Congress enacted that the people best qualified to manage and protect the 30 million hectares of Ancestral Domain lands , are the 11.7 million individuals who comprise our Indigenous Peoples, working through their representatives and under the office of the President of the Philippines. In 2004, the very President tasked with upholding the Constitution and the laws, has taken it upon herself to set aside the intent of Congress, while disregarding the protests and petitions of the Indigenous Peoples themselves.

Once again, Mr. President, our Indigenous Peoples are not free. Their future and rights have been made subservient to pencil pushers who think they know better than either Congress or the stakeholders whose needs have been addressed by law. Instead of protecting and preserving what has been hard-gained, a state policy has been subverted and the sad history of attempting to reduce our Indigenous Peoples to the level of mendicant pawns has been resumed.

Mr. President, when the law is clear, it must be applied. This is a fundamental imperative of law. When Social Justice is envisioned, the means to institute it must neither be subverted nor removed. When peoples have been empowered, they must not have their empowerment reversed and their status made subordinate.

Mr. President, when the Constitution, Congress, and our people are thwarted, they must be upheld. When a minority has its rights reduced, the rights of the majority being reduced cannot be far off.

In the face of the Executive Department’s challenge to the basic principles of republican governance, constitutional order, and the rights of our Indigenous Peoples, Mr. President, I cannot be silent. And neither can this chamber. I ask that the Senate of the Philippines rise to the defence of our Constitution, the basic tenets of legality, and our Indigenous Peoples. I ask that this chamber resolve to face up to the Executive Department’s arrogating to itself the powers of Congress. I move, Mr. President, that this chamber should call upon the President of the Philippines to revoke the provisions of Executive Order 364 subordinating the Commission on Indigenous Peoples to the Department of Land Reform.

Our indigenous peoples may live differently from us, but they have equal rights. Rights we must uphold as their elected representatives. Rights that are theirs in perpetuity, and not by virtue of executive whimsy or political convenience. I cannot stay silent in the face of such a manifest injustice, Mr. President, and neither should anyone else in this chamber.

As least, Mr. President, the Nazi’s were less hypocritical. They proclaimed the “Final Solution” to eliminate the gypsies and the jews. The Final Solution, “Filipino style” has been done through stealth. The goal, however, whether in Berlin in 1943 when the Final Solution was decided, or Manila in 2004, when EP 364 was signed is the same – TO KILL A CULTURE.

I thank you.