Bills for indigenous peoples filed in Senate
Credit to Author: Javier J. Ismael| Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 16:42:05 +0000
TWO bills that seek to address the plight of 14 million to 17 million indigenous peoples (IPs) and indigenous cultural communities (ICCs) have been filed in the Senate.
The measures filed by Senators Juan Edgardo Angara and Ramon Revilla Jr., Senate Bills (SBs) 706 and 443, pushed for the establishment of resource centers to improve the delivery of essential services to IPs and ICCs.
The two measures have been referred to the Committee on Cultural Communities headed by Sen. Maria Imelda Josefa Marcos.
Angara said despite the enactment in 1997 of Republic Act 8371, or the “Indigenous
Peoples Rights Act,” and the various international aids given to them, IPs and ICCs remain the poorest in the country.
He cited the 2010 Report on the State of the World by the United Nations, which revealed that ICCs and IPs “make up one-third of the world’s poorest peoples, suffer disproportionately in areas like health, education and human rights and regularly face systemic discrimination and exclusion.”
Of the millions of IPs in the country, 61 percent could be found in Mindanao while 33 percent were in Northern Luzon, Angara said.
“It is imperative to establish resource centers in all ICCs/Ips, which are ethnographically located as determined by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples. These centers shall enhance the delivery of basic, social, technical and legal services to the ICCs and IPs,” the senator said.
Revilla, meanwhile, lamented the lack of data on the distribution of IPs in the country, citing reports from the Indigenous People’s International Policy Research and Education.
The report, released in September 2016, observed that “credibility of the results and enumeration methodology have been questioned,” he said.