44 FMR 59 Twenty Years of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement October 2018 www.fmreview.org/GuidingPrinciples20 A disaster approach to displacement: IDPs in the Philippines Reinna Bermudez, Francis Tom Temprosa and Odessa Gonzalez Benson In the absence of a national policy on internal displacement, the Philippines has used a disaster management framework to address displacement caused by terrorism-related confict in Marawi City. Such a response, however, suffers from the absence of a rights-based foundation. A fve-month armed encounter between State armed forces and the Islamic State-inspired Maute Group, which began in May 2017, displaced around 360,000 people from Marawi City in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. These internally displaced persons (IDPs) mainly sought refuge in evacuation centres in neighbouring areas and with family members outside Marawi. According to UN reports of August 2018, over 320,000 IDPs have returned to areas declared safe by the military but full rebuilding eforts are still underway and 69,412 IDPs remain in limbo. 1 The Philippines has no laws relating specifcally to IDPs. Instead, legal guidelines for the State’s response in cases of displacement are based on the Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act of 2010 (PDRRMA). 2 This law reconfgures the traditional roles of national and local government agencies, giving them additional responsibility for disaster response. PDRRMA was hailed as a landmark when it was passed but the limitations of this framework are now evident. It is principally about structures rather than rights and standards, about response actors rather than displaced people, and this does not translate into systematic, efcient response; recovery eforts are still created on an ad hoc basis following disasters. Furthermore, it contains no rights language, except in its non-binding declarations. The lack of a clear human rights-based underpinning UNHCR/Annie Sakkab This evacuation centre in Iligan City, the Philippines, holds 56 families displaced by the Marawi confict.