E/CN.4/2003/90/Add.3 page 28 4 Republic Act No. 1888. 5 Republic Act No. 8371. 6 Marvic M.V.F. Leonen, “The Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997 (Republic Act No. 8371): Will this Legal Reality Bring Us to a More Progressive Level of Political Discourse?” Philippine Natural Resources Law Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, September 1998, p. 9, summarizes the provisions of the law as follows: (a) civil and political rights of all members of indigenous cultural communities or indigenous peoples; (b) social and cultural rights of all members of indigenous cultural communities or indigenous peoples; (c) recognition of a general concept of indigenous property right and granting title thereto; and (d) creation of a National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) to act as a mechanism to coordinate implementation of the law as well as a final authority that has jurisdiction to issue Certificates of Ancestral Domains/Land Titles. 7 According to the law, claims to ancestral domains must be applied for by the interested communities for ancestral land titles to be formally recognized. Some lands are not considered subject to claims at all, when other private land claims exist, and there is a special provision of exemption for Baguio City (the indigenous city in Benguet Province, northern Luzon). All this has confused indigenous organizations as to the possible benefits for them of IPRA. Some indigenous representatives indicated to the Special Rapporteur that IPRA “should be scrapped altogether” because it does not fully meet the aspirations of indigenous peoples. 8 This provision raises the issue of conflict of laws particularly between the 1995 Mining Act and IPRA. See section III D below, “Conflict of Laws”. 9 Ancestral domains refer to “all areas generally belonging to indigenous cultural communities/indigenous peoples (ICCs/IPs) comprising lands, inland waters, coastal areas, and natural resources therein, held under a claim of ownership, occupied or possessed by ICCs/IPs, by themselves or through their ancestors, communally or individually since time immemorial, continuously to the present … It shall include ancestral lands, forests, pasture, residential, agricultural, and other lands individually owned whether alienable and disposable or otherwise, hunting grounds, burial grounds, worship areas, bodies of water, mineral and other natural resources, and lands which may no longer be exclusively occupied by ICCs/IPs but from which they traditionally had access to for their subsistence and traditional activities, particularly the home ranges of ICCs/IPs who are still nomadic and/or shifting cultivators”. Ancestral lands, on the other hand, refer to “land occupied, possessed and utilized by individuals, families and clans who are members of the ICCs/IPs since time immemorial, by themselves or through their predecessors-in-interest, under claims of individual or traditional group ownership, continuously, to the present except when interrupted by war, force majeure or displacement, deceit, stealth, or as a consequence of government projects and other voluntary dealings entered into by government and private individuals/corporations, including, but not limited to, residential lots, rice terraces, private forests, swidden farms and tree lots” (chapter II, section 3 of IPRA).