The true test of a just society is how it treats those who have the least political power to defend their rights.
Amnesty International Philippines responding to the New Guidelines on Free and Prior Informed Consent released by NCIP through Administrative Order No. 1, Series of 2026
Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) embodies Indigenous Peoples’ Right. It is an expression of their right to self-determination, participation, cultural integrity, and freedom from coercion, enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and protected under the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA) and the Philippine Constitution,
Amnesty International Philippines maintains that no reform of process can lawfully diminish a set of rights that Congress and the Constitution already guarantee. The 2026 FPIC Guidelines push FPIC away from a rights-based approach and toward merely an administrative process, one where speed and standardization are prioritized over genuine and customary participative consultations and decision-making.
Timelines must not outpace customary decision-making
The new Guidelines impose fixed day-counts on stages of the FPIC process that, by their nature, cannot be rushed. Timelines laid directly over decision-making processes that the Guidelines itself provides should follow customary law and community-specific governance. Customary consensus-building does not run on a fixed administrative calendar. A community can request more time but the default, and the burden, favors the administrative process and not the community. The concern must not be on how fast FPIC is obtained but whether or not the communities retain a genuine opportunity to make decisions that affect their lives and keep their agency as a people.
Consent must not be presumed nor accelerated or administratively inferred. FPIC is supposed to function as an absolute veto. These mechanics risk turning it into a conditional bargaining position.
Independent oversight is missing where it matters most
Human rights protection cannot rely on self-monitoring. Yet under the new framework, the NCIP’s authority over project proponents who violate the process is limited to fact-finding, monitoring, and recommending action, and the actual enforcement is left to the same regulatory agency that issued the underlying permit. The body meant to safeguard community rights during monitoring is funded, in part, by the very applicant it is supposed to be watching.
Oversight without independent enforcement is not oversight. It is documentation.
High-risk activities get the least attention
Exploration, scoping, and feasibility activities are the earliest, most consequential phase of any extractive project where consent must be established. A single community resolution skips the full assembly, deliberation, and negotiations altogether. And when a domain-wide development plan is confirmed, future projects consistent with it may bypass project-specific FPIC entirely.
Indigenous leaders have been clear that these guidelines fast-tracking approval for private commercial gains turns a process which should be an uncompromising part of the negotiations into merely superficial checklist.
Policy was developed without the input of the IP communities
Human rights-based policy-making requires transparency, meaningful participation, access to information, and accountability. The communities who will be affected by these Guidelines should have developed them. Instead, the consultation process was railroaded, and lacked direct, localized discussion with the communities whose ancestral domains are at stake.
FPIC disputes place indigenous leaders, environmental defenders, community organizers, women, and youth on the frontline. Weakening procedural safeguards increases their vulnerability to intimidation, reprisals, criminalization, and violence.
The 2026 FPI Guidelines should not be judged by how much they accelerate investments, but by whether they continue to protect the constitutional and human rights of indigenous Peoples. If consent becomes easier to obtain because communities are given less time, less space, or less power to decide, then we have fundamentally misunderstood what Free, Prior, and Informed Consent means.
Human rights is not an obstacle to development. They are the conditions that make development just, legitimate, and sustainable.
What Amnesty International Philippines is calling for:
- The NCIP, must respect the customary decision-making processes of indigenous peoples. Amnesty cannot emphasize more the importance of allowing IP groups to follow their own traditions and processes in reaching consensus – more so on matters affecting the management of their territories and the resources within.
- The new NCIP guidelines, instead of strengthening indigenous practices, fast tracks decision making periods for the benefit of project proponents disregarding the more thorough deliberation usually required by IP groups
- The NCIP should undertake a nationwide consultation that ensures the full participation of indigenous peoples and their support groups. The process must be made public, transparent, and thorough with the aim of creating a strong FPIC policy that respects, protects and fulfills the rights of IPs. Likewise, the new FPIC policy should result in empoweredindigenous peoples’ communities
- The FPIC should also highlight the need for a clear benefit-sharing agreements; provisions for effective redress mechanisms to prevent exploitation; and, a clear guideline for the creation of an independent monitoring body to ensure accountability and prevent abuses.