04/02/2020 E-Library - Information At Your Fingertips: Printer Friendly Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE) is nowhere to be found in the 1987 Constitution, which provides for the country's territorial and political subdivisions as follows: "The territorial and political subdivisions of the Republic of the Philippines are the provinces, cities, municipalities, and barangays. There shall be autonomous regions in Muslim Mindanao and the Cordilleras as hereinafter provided."[2] In the case of the autonomous regions, their creation is the shared responsibility of the political branches of the government and the constituent units affected. The Constitution is explicit in this regard, to wit: "The Congress shall enact an organic act for each autonomous region with the assistance and participation of the regional consultative commission composed of representatives appointed by the President from a list of nominees from multisectoral bodies. The organic act shall define the basic structure of government for the region consisting of the executive department and legislative assembly, both of which shall be elective and representative of the constituent political units. The organic acts shall likewise provide for special courts with personal, family, and property law jurisdiction consistent with the provisions of this constitution and national law. The creation of the autonomous region shall be effective when approved by majority of the votes cast by the constituent units in a plebiscite called for the purpose, provided that only provinces, cities, and geographic areas voting favorably in such plebiscite shall be included in the autonomous region."[3] (Emphasis supplied) If the establishment of autonomy requires the joint participation of Congress, the President, and of the people in the area affected, from the inception of the process of creation of an autonomous region, with more reason, the creation of the BJE - an entity intended to have its own basic law to be adopted in accordance with an "associative arrangement" - which would imply, in legal terms, semiindependence if not outright independence - cannot be negotiated without the participation of Congress and consultations with the people, residing not only in the area to be placed under the BJE but also in the rest of our country. Even with the participation of Congress and the consultation with stakeholders, the process at the onset must conform and explicitly be subject to our Constitution. This is specially important as the unsigned MOA-AD stipulates a definite framework that threatens to erase, through the "policies, rules and regulations" and basic law of the BJE, the objective existence of over four hundred (400) years of development and progress of our people by unsettling private voluntary agreements and undoing the official acts of our government institutions performed pursuant to the Constitution and the laws in force during the said long period in our history, within the identified areas, to be carved out of a substantial portion of the national territory, and with only the "details", the "mechanisms and modalities for actual implementation" to be negotiated and embodied in a Comprehensive Compact. To my mind, this alarming possibility contemplated in the MOA-AD may be the cause of chaos and even greater strife for our brothers in the south, rather than bring about the intended peace. elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocsfriendly/1/47263 120/203