The Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro is in danger of becoming the next failed Philippine peace agreement — not because the agreement is flawed, and not because the Bangsamoro people are unready, but because the legal foundation on which it rests is structurally insufficient. The Bangsamoro Organic Law, enacted as ordinary legislation, can be amended by a congressional majority, hollowed out by implementing regulations, constrained by judicial interpretation, and circumvented through executive action. All four have already happened.
The evidence is visible and accumulating. The first BARMM parliamentary elections have been postponed four times. The MILF suspended decommissioning of its remaining 14,000 combatants, citing government non-compliance with normalization obligations. The Third Party Monitoring Team described trust between the parties as “at an all-time low.” The Supreme Court, in September 2024, excluded Sulu from BARMM despite its inclusion in the peace negotiations. President Marcos replaced MILF-nominated Chief Minister Al Haj Murad Ebrahim with a figure closer to Malacañang — what MILF First Vice Chairman Mohagher Iqbal called not a transition, but a “regime change.”
Each development can be explained individually as political mismanagement or institutional friction. Together, they reveal a structural condition: the CAB was never given the constitutional rank that would have made its commitments genuinely enforceable.
The 1987 Philippine Constitution is the baseline against which all Bangsamoro arrangements are interpreted. Article X establishes autonomous regions “within the framework of this Constitution and the national sovereignty as well as territorial integrity of the Republic of the Philippines.” The Supreme Court interprets Bangsamoro autonomy not against the CAB’s intentions, but against the Constitution’s text. In 2008, the Court struck down the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain — a precursor to the CAB — ruling that its power-sharing architecture exceeded what the Constitution permitted. In 2024, the Sulu ruling demonstrated the same dynamic. The court had no other instrument available to it. This is not a malfunction; it is the system working exactly as designed. And it will continue producing the same results until the Constitution itself is amended.
Other peace processes have confronted this problem and found answers. In Northern Ireland, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement achieved constitutional entrenchment on both sides: Ireland amended Articles 2 and 3 of its Constitution by referendum with 94 percent approval, and the UK enacted the Northern Ireland Act 1998. When Brexit threatened the Agreement’s architecture a generation later, those constitutional foundations held. In Colombia, after the 2016 FARC peace accord was ratified, Congress passed Legislative Act 2 of 2017, creating a transitional constitutional article binding three successive presidential administrations to the agreement’s core commitments. When President Duque — elected on an anti-accord platform — refused to sign implementing legislation in 2019, Congress overrode him and the Constitutional Court ordered his signature. Constitutional entrenchment held against a hostile president. The BOL offers no comparable protection against an equivalent scenario in the Philippines.
The most relevant precedent, however, is the Philippines’ own 1996 Final Peace Agreement with the MNLF. That agreement was implemented through Republic Act No. 9054, without constitutional amendment. By 2001, five years after signing, renewed fighting had broken out. The ARMM became a governance failure by nearly universal consensus — unable to exercise meaningful autonomy, unable to implement security reforms, unable to prevent conflict recurrence. The CAB was negotiated with the explicit purpose of correcting what the ARMM failed to deliver. But if its basis remains ordinary legislation, subject to the same judicial interpretation and the same political reversibility, it inherits the same structural vulnerability.
Constitutional entrenchment is the mechanism by which a political settlement is distinguished from a policy preference. It signals that the Bangsamoro arrangement is not subject to revision by the next congressional majority or the next administration. Targeted revisions to Article X of the 1987 Constitution — protecting the Bangsamoro parliamentary system, the fiscal autonomy arrangements, and the normalization framework — would accomplish this without requiring full charter change. The Colombian model is instructive: a focused constitutional amendment that protects specific institutions and commitments, rather than attempting to embed an entire political order.
For the Philippine government, pursuing this amendment is not a concession to the MILF. It is the mechanism by which the state makes its own commitments credible — to investors, to development partners, to the Bangsamoro people, and to history. A peace settlement protected only by ordinary legislation is one the state reserves the right to undo.
PHP 337.5 billion in Block Grant transfers and a 29-percentage-point reduction in poverty incidence represent a significant achievement. Those gains rest on a legally uncertain foundation. Advocacy for constitutional reform should accompany development investment, not be treated as a separate political matter.
Every administration since 2014 has declared commitment to the CAB. The gap between declaration and structural action is exactly what makes those declarations insufficient. Constitutional entrenchment is not the only measure of sincerity — but it is the most durable one.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Camilo “Bong” Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines)
