The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) on Friday, Sept. 9 led the signing of the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of Republic Act (RA) 11767 or the Foundling Recognition and Protection Act of 2022.

DSWD Secretary Erwin Tulfo expressed gratitude to the lawmakers who pushed for the passage of the measure that promotes the rights and ensures additional protection for children with unknown facts of birth and parentage.

“We won’t be here had it not been for our lawmakers who championed this, who authored this law, for those children considered as foundlings. So to the lawmakers who gave priority to this law, maraming, maraming salamat po sa inyo (thank you very much),” he said during the signing of the IRR.

RA 11767 was signed by former President Rodrigo Duterte on May 6, 2022.

Under the law, foundlings in the Philippines and in Philippine embassies, consulates, or territories abroad will be presumed a natural-born Filipino citizen—regardless of the status of their birth circumstances—which will guarantee the best interest of children with unknown facts of birth and parentage because they will immediately be accorded the rights and protection of a Filipino citizen at the moment of birth.

This entails the right to be provided with government programs and services, such as registration, facilitation of documents for adoption, education, legal and police protection, medical care, health and proper nourishment care, and admission to safe and secure child centers, among others.

According to National Authority for Child Care (NACC) Undersecretary Janella Ejercito Estrada, the IRR institutionalizes the mechanisms and processes the moment an individual with no know facts of birth and parentage is found.

“Further, foundlings who have reached the majority age without benefitting from the legal adoption process are also covered. By this, we accord them life long protection of their rights and liberties by institutionalizing our policy that they be not deprived or discriminated by reason of being a foundling,” Estrada said.

NACC is an attached agency of the DSWD.

“For the part of the DSWD, we commit to work with concerned government agencies and private stakeholders to effectively and efficiently implement the IRR of this law. The Department is ready to provide social protection services through its managed residential care facilities and regular programs to ensure that foundlings will receive the necessary alternative child care that puts premium to their best interest,” Tulfo said.

“Moreover, the DSWD and its attached agency, the National Authority for Child Care or NACC, will participate in the systematic data collection of foundling cases including exhausting all efforts to make known the foundlings birth facts and parentage through quad media,” he said.

Estrada said the NACC is poised to provide frontline service and ensure exhaustive efforts to establish the child’s identity by facilitating immediate government intervention.

“Through this measure, we also implore an inter-agency collaboration by ensuring the safety of the child by undertaking diligent and exhaustive efforts to determine the foundling’s facts of birth and parentage and by providing the appropriate alternative child care,” Estrada said.

Estrada noted that, at some point, biological parents are accorded with legal remedy to restore their parental authority and guardianship on sufficient grounds.

“On a more personal note, I believe that RA 11767 is a gesture of our nationalism by extending the very same rights we enjoy to a foundling discovered within Philippine territory. This law and its IRR is an affirmation of our shared values that every child has inherent rights that no individual, institution, or state can refute,” Estrada said.