Statement of Phillipines, October, 2015

In the Philippines, we are now striving to accomplish both. Our current endeavours draw their context from long decades of an internal armed conflict involving various armed fronts, and our current peace agenda involves five peace tables. The signing by the Philippine Government of the comprehensive agreement on the Bangsamoro with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front on 27 March 2014 was historic, not only because it signalled the end of a long-standing war in the Southern Philippines, but also because it is the first agreement of its kind in the world to bear the signature of a total of three women, who accounted for one half of the negotiating panel of the Government and about one fourth of the total number of its signatories. It is the first such agreement to bear the signature of a woman as chief negotiator, Ms. Miriam Coronel-Ferrer.

Moreover, 69 per cent of the secretariat of the Government panel, including its head, and 60 per cent of the legal team, including its head, are women. The heads of those bodies are under the ages of 35 and 30 years, respectively. The Government panel has committed to enforce the right of women to “meaningful political participation and protection from all forms of violence” in its source document, the framework agreement, which yielded concrete, gender-sensitive provisions in the agreement’s four annexes, as well as in the draft Bangsamoro basic law, now pending approval in our Congress. Today, women representatives in Congress are among the staunchest champions of the proposed law, while, on the side of the executive branch, a woman co-chairs the joint normalization committee, which oversees multiple security, transitional justice and socioeconomic interventions aimed at ensuring that peace will endure — not only in the law, but on the ground.