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Sha Elijah Dumama-Alba is creating a new legal system for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region with inclusive and restorative justice at the forefront of her work

Elijah spoke to Salzburg Global during "Safe and Secure and Humane: Opportunities for the Future of Justice System Reform." This program took place between May 14 and May 19, 2022.

While Sha Elijah Dumama-Alba has long been involved in Filipino legal reform and advocacy, at one point, that seemed unlikely. As she grew up in a family of doctors, she was expected to enter the medical field. She even went as far as taking pre-med, but she later realized that she wanted to work in law.  

In 2008, she was admitted to the Philippine Bar and moved to New York to work as a legal officer. But her family and her country were more important than what would have been a comfortable life in the U.S. So, she moved back to her home city of Cotabato and restarted her career there.

Having grown up in the city and region, Elijah has lived experiences of the conflict between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Filipino government. So, when her uncle – who served as the secretariat of the MILF during the 2012 to 2014 peace talks – needed a lawyer, she felt a calling.  

“I saw that as some divine intervention. Maybe God put me in that position because I knew I could really impact and contribute to my own community,” Elijah explained.

She joined the negotiations team during the time that the draft of the Bangsamoro Basic Law (also known as the Bangsamoro Organic Law) was being presented to the Congress and Senate of the Philippines.  Then came the unexpected: the team’s main lawyers resigned, leaving the negotiators stranded without a legal representative to argue their case. So, they turned to Elijah to present the Basic Law. This was a turning point for her.

She said, “I was asking myself, do I deserve being in the limelight that early in my career? The feeling I got was that the sense of belonging and solidarity with the people I was working with and knowing that we were working on something bigger than ourselves.”

Elijah is the first attorney-general of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, a position she’s held since 2019. One of her primary tasks is establishing the region’s legal system. An integral part of this new structure would be the inclusion of Sharia law into the Bangsamoro Organic Law. Lawmakers and practitioners didn’t believe that the established legal system could co-exist with the Sharia justice system, a move that would only be applicable in the Bangsamoro region.  

Read our case study “Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and Judiciary Reforms”

“We had some compromises with the congressmen and senators because they wanted the legal system to be not beyond the constitutional restrictions as we still live in the Philippines,” said Elijah.

The situation is emblematic of a larger issue: from Sharia practitioners and religious scholars to elected officials and the general public, people in the Bangsamoro region felt neglected by the national government. The creation of this new legal system is a crucial part of addressing this neglect, with Elijah intentionally reaching out to stakeholders to include their perspectives and experiences.

The importance of perspective is what she hopes she’s imparted while participating in the Global Innovations in Youth Violence, Safety & Justice initiative. Taking the time to talk to people and understand their contexts and experiences is a fundamental process to criminal justice reform and advocacy.  

Elijah has also learned much from her peers in the initiative. “We have common issues that we each approach differently. Listening to all these conversations is really opening my mind to think outside the box because the disciplines they come from are different from mine,” she says.

Grateful for the people she met and the knowledge sharing she participated in, Elijah will continue to work in the legal sector to protect and represent the rights of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region.