Cruz and Europa v. Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources

legislative fiat...that ownership of vast tracts of land belongs to [indigenous peoples] without judicial confirmation."[81] The Solicitor General, for his part, claims that the Cariño doctrine applies only to alienable lands of the public domain and, as such, cannot be extended to other lands of the public domain such as forest or timber, mineral lands, and national parks. There is no merit in these contentions. A proper reading of Cariño would show that the doctrine enunciated therein applies only to lands which have always been considered as private, and not to lands of the public domain, whether alienable or otherwise. A distinction must be made between ownership of land under native title and ownership by acquisitive prescription against the State. Ownership by virtue of native title presupposes that the land has been held by its possessor and his predecessors-in-interest in the concept of an owner since time immemorial. The land is not acquired from the State, that is, Spain or its successors-in-interest, the United States and the Philippine Government. There has been no transfer of title from the State as the land has been regarded as private in character as far back as memory goes. In contrast, ownership of land by acquisitive prescription against the State involves a conversion of the character of the property from alienable public land to private land, which presupposes a transfer of title from the State to a private person. Since native title assumes that the property covered by it is private land and is deemed never to have been part of the public domain, the Solicitor General's thesis that native title under Cariño applies only to lands of the public domain is erroneous. Consequently, the classification of lands of the public domain into agricultural, forest or timber, mineral lands, and national parks under the Constitution[82] is irrelevant to the application of the Cariño doctrine because the Regalian doctrine which vests in the State ownership of lands of the public domain does not cover ancestral lands and ancestral domains. Legal history supports the Cariño doctrine. When Spain acquired sovereignty over the Philippines by virtue of its discovery and occupation thereof in the 16th century and the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 which it entered into with Portugal,[83] the continents of Asia, the Americas and Africa were considered as terra nullius although already populated by other peoples.[84] The discovery and occupation by the European States, who were then considered as the only members of the international community of civilized nations, of lands in the said continents were deemed sufficient to create title under international law.[85] Although Spain was deemed to have acquired sovereignty over the Philippines, this did not mean that it acquired title to all lands in the archipelago. By virtue of the colonial laws of Spain, the Spanish Crown was considered to have acquired dominion only over the unoccupied and unclaimed portions of our islands.[86] In sending the first expedition to the Philippines, Spain did not intend to deprive the natives of their property. Miguel Lopez de Legazpi was under instruction of the Spanish King to do no harm to the natives and to their property. In this regard, an authority on the early Spanish colonial period in the Philippines wrote: The government of [the King of Spain] Philip II regarded the Philippines as a challenging opportunity to avoid a repetition of the sanguinary conquests of Mexico and Peru. In his written instructions for the Adelantado Legazpi, who commanded the expedition, Philip II envisaged a bloodless pacification of the archipelago. This extraordinary document could have been lifted almost verbatim from the lectures of the Dominican theologian, Francisco de Vitoria, delivered in the University of Salamanca. The King instructed Legazpi to inform the natives that the Spaniards had come to do no harm to their persons or to their property. The Spaniards intended to live among them in peace and in friendship and "to explain to them the law of Jesus Christ by which they will be saved." Although the Spanish expedition could defend themselves if attacked, the royal