What Is The Right To Self Determination

The Philippines, like many of the third world countries in Southeast Asia, is now seriously confronted with problems related to their ethnic and religious minority populations. As a multi-cultural state, one of its major problems is how to forge unity and cooperation among the various ethnic groups in the country. The Bangsamoro people, one of these minority groups, have been struggling for their right to self-determination. Their struggle has taken several forms ranging from parliamentary to armed struggle with a major demand of a regional political autonomy or separate Islamic State. Several conflicts today are taking place within and across states. The roots of many of these intra-state conflicts can be traced to the denial of state authorities of their citizens’ assertion that they have a right to self-determination.

Bangsamoro is the collective identity of the Islamized people in Mindanao, in the islands of Basilan and Palawan, and the Sulu and Tawi-Tawi archipelago in the south of the Philippines. The Bangsamoro means the Moro nation, as people

It is closely associated with a claim to a territory in which they can observe their customs and practices and govern themselves, a land alluded to, with emotional overtones, as the ancestral domain or homeland. Each state 's territorial integrity is inviolable and that all peoples have a right to self-determination are bedrock principles of international law enshrined in the U.N. Charter. Yet these two principles conflict when an oppressed minority seeks to achieve self-determination by seceding from an existing state. The complete implementation of the principle of self-determination undermines the principle of territorial integrity. In other words, only legal secession would not undermine territorial integrity of the parent