Cotabato City (June 20, 2020)—The Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA) aims to file all the priority bills in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) before September 2020 including the region’s Administrative Code.
According to the parliament’s Majority Floor Leader Atty. Lanang Ali Jr. in an interview on Radyo Bangsamoro, on Saturday, BARMM’s Attorney General Sha Elijah Dumama-Alba presented the draft of the administrative code at the recently held cabinet meeting and they’ve already reached a consensus.
“We’ve agreed in the cabinet meeting that the Bangsamoro Administrative Code will be filed anytime soon,” he announced.
The Bangsamoro Government is currently following the Bangsamoro Transition Plan while waiting for the passage of the Administrative Code, a law that will define the administrative structures, including the creation of offices in the BARMM, among others.
“The moment the Bangsamoro Administrative Code becomes a law, the structures in the Bangsamoro Transition Plan will be incorporated,” Ali noted.
The Bangsamoro Transition Plan was approved and adopted last year by the BTA, its provisions were also used as the basis of creating the Bangsamoro Administrative Code.
“And once we pass the administrative code, this will be the permanent procedures and structure that will we use,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Majority Floor Leader also stressed the urgency of filing the Local Government Code on either June or July this year. However, he said this code will undergo a series of public consultations with all the Local Government Units (LGU) in the region before they can file it to the parliament.
“The coverage of this code is broad and we need public consultations from the ground. We will go to the LGUs and ask them about their proposed provisions that we can possibly include in this code. Because this code will consume a lot of time, we need to file this right away,” he noted.
Other priority bills to be filed are the Bangsamoro Electoral Code, the Civil Service Code, Revenue Code, and the Law on Indigenous People.
Furthermore, the Bangsamoro Appropriation’s Act of 2021 will be discussed in the plenary in October 2020. (Bureau of Public Administration)
