2 Ejercito-Estrada, Richard J. Gordon, Juan Miguel F. Zubiri, and Santiago again in the 14' Congress. That Sen. Gordon and Rep. Golez are both PNRCstalwarts definitely helped to clinch passage of the “IHL Bill” in this outgoing 14 Congress. The key Congressional Committee chairs, namely Sen. Francis “Chiz” G. Escudero and Rep. Matias V. Defensor, Jr. deserve credit for shepherding the bill all the way up to the third chamber, the Bicameral Conference Committee, in October 2009. Early in term of the 14Congress in 2007, it had become a priority bill of the Legislative-Executive Development and Advisory Council (LEDAC). Butall told historically, credit mustalso be givento the various humanrights and IHL advocatesin civil society as well as in government whohad worked long and hardfor the “IHL Bill.” To makea long story short, the “IHL Bill” went through both the legislative and executive wringer. If I might attemptto recall and summarizethe substantivecritical issues against the “IHL Bill,” they tendedto revolve around certain concerns of the military/defense/ security establishmentsuch asthese three critical issues: Whethermilitary and police operations against insurgents andterrorists will be hampered by all these new and complicatedrules. Whether military and police commanders and personnel would be subjected to multiple harassment suits (inc. double jeopardy) in both military andcivil fora. Whetherthe rebel groups might be unwittingly granted “belligerency status” or take advantage of certain provisions to acquire the same(specifically the status of a "national liberation movement" underProtocolI, entitling them amongothersto "prisonerof war"status). In fact, it is these kinds of concerns, even more than whatever constitutional and criminal law issues,that werethereal stumbling blocks to the “IHL Bill.” As for those legal issues, these three were the morecritical ones: -- relationship with the issue of Rome Statute ratification by the Philippines, inc. whetherthis is a "backdoor" circumvention of non-ratification -- conflict with certain Constitutional provisions like Presidential immunity from suit, equal protection (e.g. double standards vis-a-vis other crimes), double jeopardy, Supreme Court rulemaking prerogative -- possible duplication, overlap, confusion and complication of Philippine criminal law, inc. the Anti-Terrorism Law, the Juvenile Justice Law and then pending bills on torture and enforced disappearances Becauseof time considerations, I will not discuss any more how someof these substantive critical issues against the “IHL Bill” were surmounted. Some of them will be addressed tangentially in the course of this presentation. I am sure somewill also be addressed by the next speakers, esp. by Chamaine of ICRC. By 2007,if not earlier, ICRC embarked on a purposive effort to engage or lobby the executive and the security sector at a high policy and decision-makinglevel and which ultimately bore fruit. 2007 was a watershedyearnot only in this purposive lobbyingeffort but also in the unprecedented attention to the issue of extra-judicial killings which was, to use current pop terms, the “hot issue” that year. Of course, for an issue to becomea “hotissue,” there is the indispensable role of media. All in that same year of 2007, we had the Melo Commission Report, the Alston Mission and Reports, and the National Consultative Summit on Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances convened by the Supreme Court. Relevantto all these is the wisdom articulated by Peter Herby, long-time Coordinator of the Mines-Arms Unit of the ICRC, whenhesaid in the context of the Ottawa Treaty’s total ban on victim-activated anti-personnel landmines that: “... In most case[s], it has been the role of ‘public conscience,’ the mobilization of public conscience, which has in fact been the driving force behind these prohibitions — whetherof chemical weapons,biological weapons, blinding laser weaponsorothers.” In 2008,particularly after the aborted signing of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) in August, we of course had the major outbreak of armed hostilities between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Armed Forcesof the Philippines (AFP) in Central Mindanao,resulting in the biggest new internal displacementglobally for that year. And then towards the endof that year, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), on the occasion of its 40 anniversary, set into motion a plan for a “qualitative leap” of the armedrevolution, that involves the New People’s Army (NPA) advancing “from the stage of strategic defensive to that of strategic stalemate”in its protracted people’s war offour decades. That we have beenin this for that long on two majorfronts ofarmedconflict -- most intensely in Mindanao as Amina and Rubywill tell you -- maybesaid to be the ultimate rationalefor R.A. No. 9851, which in fact is long overdue.