Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions and Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions a. Most if not all of the economic, social and cultural rights violations invoked by the petitioners can be linked back to civil and political rights, specifically the right to life – also invoked in the petition – and the right to property. While the petitioners have not alleged violations of the constitutional right to property resulting from climate change impacts, the Commission’s mandate affords it the option to sua sponte consider violations of this right alone and in conjunction with other rights.8 Extensive domestic, regional and international practice on the mutual recognition of economic, social, cultural rights and civil and political rights exists. On the one hand, even when economic, social and cultural rights are justiciable at domestic and international levels, they have been linked to civil and political rights (or vice versa) reflecting customary acceptance of the human rights’ interrelatedness, interdependence, and indivisibility.9 On the other hand, the linking has been employed to protect economic, social and cultural rights when the domestic legislative framework does not permit their direct judicial enforcement, for example, in cases where they are enshrined in the constitution as aspirational goals. At international level, this practice has been traditionally utilized to remedy the lack of complaint procedures for economic, social and cultural rights violations,10 or when a human rights treaty did not include specific economic, social and cultural rights.11 In particular, the right to life and the right to property have become ‘intersectional’ devices for the protection of numerous economic, social and cultural rights, including the rights to health, to food, to water, to housing (and specifically the prohibition of forced eviction), to education, to social security, and indigenous peoples’ right to land.12 The practice is by no means restricted to the much-publicised Indian courts’ interpretation of the right to life as a right to livelihood,13 but is substantial in quantity and universal in coverage.14 b. In accordance with the well-established doctrine of compétence de la compétence, it is for the Commission to determine the scope of its own jurisdiction.15 c. Most compellingly, the Commission’s jurisdiction to adopt its Omnibus Rules of Procedure has not been the subject of domestic legal challenge. Accordingly, the Omnibus Rules in their current form are demonstrably intra vires as a matter of Philippines law for the purposes of the current Inquiry. 6 5. Furthermore, the Commission’s jurisdiction under the Constitution to consider breaches of economic, social and cultural rights in exercising its functions under B and C listed in paragraph 2 above is beyond dispute. Sections 18(6) and 18(7) give the Commission a very broad mandate to, respectively, recommend to the Congress effective measures to promote human rights and to monitor the Philippine Government’s compliance with international treaty obligations on human rights. In exercising both of these functions the Commission is free to determine the manner in which it will inform itself to make such recommendations or to conduct such monitoring, including by conducting a public inquiry. 6. Significantly too, the Supreme Court of the Philippines has already established a solid jurisprudence regarding the alignment between civil and political and economic, social and cultural rights. The Court has adopted an open approach, whereby international human rights treaties are applied directly, absent incorporation,16 in as far as they are seen to reflect generally accepted principles of international law.17 The Court has applied the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as ‘generally accepted principles of international law as part of the law of the Nation’ to investigate violations of a range of rights enshrined in the Declaration, including economic, social and cultural rights.18 For instance, in Villar v. TIP, the Court has annulled the expulsion by a college of students for their participation in protests, relying among others on their right to education enshrined in the UDHR.19