For Immediate Release 29 January, 2001
Washington, D.C. —The Philippine Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997. Dr. Owen J. Lynch, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), helped lay the theoretical foundation for the case and attended the hearing before the Philippine Supreme Court in April 1999. The decision, released on December 6, 2000, is believed to mark the first time in Asia that a national government has legally recognized indigenous peoples’ territorial rights.
Dr. Lynch, who joined CIEL in 1997, has been researching and advocating on behalf of indigenous rights since 1980. That year, soon after graduation from law school, he moved to the Philippines and taught at the University of the Philippines College of Law until 1988. During that time, Dr. Lynch helped establish some of that nation’s leading public interest law institutions, including the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center – Kasama sa Kalikasan (Friends of the Earth) (LRC-KSK www.info.com.ph/~lrcksk) and the Haribon Foundation’s Tanggol Kalikasan (Defend Nature). Lawyers from both non-governmental organizations intervened in support of the IPRA before the Philippine high court. LRC-KSK’s petition, which Dr. Lynch helped draft, was on behalf of nearly a hundred representatives of indigenous communities from throughout the nation. LRC-KSK lawyer Vicente Yu said that “LRC’s partnership with CIEL was inspirational and instrumental in this legal victory for indigenous peoples.”
The IPRA provides for legal recognition of ancestral domain rights pursuant to indigenous concepts of ownership. These rights had previously been recognized by the Spanish colonial regime until 1894 and then again in 1909 in a unanimous opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court written by Oliver Wendell Holmes (US Reports 212:449). The US colonial regime in Manila, however, suppressed the decision and for most of the twentieth century, the colonial regime and the post-1946 Philippine Republic asserted a claim of public ownership over ancestral domains.
Justice Puno prominently quoted Dr. Lynch’s research in the leading opinion. Dr. Lynch’s research was compiled in a doctoral dissertation titled “Colonial Legacies in a Fragile Republic: A History of Philippine Land Law and State Formation with Emphasis on the Early U.S. Regime (1898 – 1913).” The dissertation was awarded the Ambrose Gherini Prize for best work on an international law topic at Yale University in 1992. According to Dr. Lynch, “For many decades human lives and natural resources were destroyed when timber concessions and other extractive commercial enterprises were ‘legally’ overlaid on ancestral domains without any notice, participation or benefits being accorded to indigenous peoples. Hopefully that practice is now ended in the Philippines and will never recur.”
At CIEL, Dr. Lynch manages the Law and Communities Program. The L&C program works with public interest law partners in Asia, the Pacific and Africa. It plans to expand this year into Latin America. The program focuses on rural constituencies in developing countries, and particularly on promoting in-country legal expertise related to community-based property rights (CBPRs).