Besedin Egor

"The Petitioners Challenge the Constitutionality...": Regional Autonomy in the Case Law of the Supreme Court of the Philippines

ЮГО-ВОСТОЧНАЯ АЗИЯ: АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ РАЗВИТИЯ, 2026, №1(70), 182-195

 
Annotation: This article examines the decision-making mechanisms of the Supreme Court of the Philippines on issues of regional autonomy and indigenous peoples' rights during the period of the 1987 Constitution. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that combines the political science frameworks of Yash Ghai, legal analysis approaches of Martin Shapiro and Ran Hirschl with the local approaches of Raul Pangalangan and Surabhi Chopra, the article reconstructs four parallel mechanisms of judicial oversight over the periphery: textual formalism, procedural formalism, legal syllogisms, and constitutional protection. An analysis of 13 Supreme Court decisions from 1989 to 2025 demonstrates that the Court's systemic tendency toward legal correctness is structurally embedded in the configuration of a unitary state with limited asymmetric autonomy, reproducing the logic of "hegemonic preservation" not as a result of judicial bias but as a structural property of the legal process. At the same time, the author shows that the same mechanisms, under certain conditions, operate in favor of autonomy, as evidenced by the decisions in Disomangcop v. Datumanong and Province of Maguindanao del Norte v. BLGF.

Keywords: Supreme Court of the Philippines, regional autonomy, indigenous peoples, judicial control, Muslim Mindanao, Cordillera, hegemonic preservation