1 - Universal Periodic Review

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is absolutely crucial in thepolitical decision-making process and the implementation of policies and programmesrelated to access to land and agrarian reform. Recognising and supporting movementsfor landless peasants and indigenous peoples as those which struggle for land andagrarian reform must be a fundamental condition of any land access or agrarian reformpolicy or programme. The importance of the full enjoyment of civil and political rights inorder to ensure agrarian reforms which fulfill economic, social and cultural rights isevident each time a leading peasant is killed for claiming the right of her or hiscommunity to land; each time a female rural worker is arbitrarily deprived of herfreedom to set up a union for female workers; each time families and entirecommunities are brutally evicted from their land; and each time—due to obstacles ininstitutional channels in claiming the effective fulfilment of agrarian reform—publicdemonstrations, peaceful protests and direct actions, such as the non-violent occupationof land—land that is not fulfilling its social function—are violently suppressed.3.3. Philippine Agrarian Reform Legal Framework3.3.1 The 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) and theComprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP)Popular demand for redistribution of large landholdings that accumulated during theMarcos dictatorship helped to push land reform to the top of the national agenda in theimmediate post-dictatorship period despite systematic elite efforts to suppress it.National lawmaking in the relatively more open and competitive post-authoritarian elitedemocracy led to a new agrarian reform law and program in 1988 that is neither purely‘voluntary-nonredistributive’ nor purely ‘expropriative-redistributive’. The ComprehensiveAgrarian Reform Law mandates coverage of all private and public farmland regardlessof tenurial arrangements or productivity conditions. But just as it was created in suchconditions, the 1988 law is being implemented within the structural and institutionalconstraints of the very setting that it aims to change. Implementation has been highlycontentious. Making the law’s progressive elements authoritative in society has beenneither automatic nor easy because its meaning and purpose remains contested.Under the CARP, the DAR is responsible for redistributing all private lands and somegovernment-owned lands, regardless of crop or farm type. The agency is alsoresponsible for implementing leasehold reform in all land under the retention right oflandlords or as a transitory mechanism toward eventual expropriation of private lands aswell. Covering all agricultural land regardless of crop or farm type, CARP was mandatedto redistribute 8.064 million hectares of private and public land to about 4 million ruralpoor households (tenants, farmworkers, and other landless). To do this, it adoptedseveral land acquisition and distribution schemes, including: Compulsory Acquisition(CA), Operation Land Transfer (OLT), Voluntary Offer to Sell (VOS), and Voluntary LandTransfer (VLT).Compulsory Acquisition is used to expropriate land even when landlords oppose theprogram. Operation Land Transfer is the scheme used to acquire and distribute rice andcorn lands originally covered by the Marcos land reform (PD 27), which was integratedIFFM 2006 Final Report 14