The Philippines’ Fishing-Tracker Fiasco: 3 SolGens, 8 Years, 1 Self-Own

When the Government’s Top Lawyers Argue With Themselves

By Louis “Barok” C. Biraogo — August 23, 2026

THE Philippine Supreme Court just gutted the government’s vessel-tracking rule. Best part: the government spent eight years arguing with itself first, and the law that would have made this whole mess moot was sitting in the statute books the entire time. Nobody read it. Allegedly.

Let’s get one thing straight before we wade into this: nobody involved in this case is the good guy you want them to be. Not the fishing conglomerates crying privacy violation from the deck of their hundred-vessel fleets. Not the Office of the Solicitor General, which has now held three contradictory positions on the same regulation within a single decade. And certainly not the regulatory agency that, according to the Supreme Court itself, bought the tracking hardware before it finished writing the rule requiring anyone to use it. Everybody in this story had eight years to get their act together. Nobody did. Let’s dig in.

***“Philippine Government Spends 8 Years Arguing With Itself — Fish Win, Taxpayers Lose, Lawyers Bill Anyway”***

The Setup

In January, the Philippine Supreme Court voted 13-2 to strike down Fisheries Administrative Order No. 266 — the rule requiring commercial fishing vessels to run 24/7 satellite tracking and electronic catch reporting. The Court agreed with a 2021 trial court finding that the rule violates the operators’ rights to privacy, protection against unreasonable search, due process, and equal protection. The decision sat quietly for over six months before anyone outside the courthouse noticed, then dropped publicly in August, at which point everyone with a stake in Philippine fisheries simultaneously lost their minds.

Two motions for reconsideration landed on the same day, August 14. One from the government, defending the tracking rule with the moral fervor of a man defending something he personally set on fire twice in the past decade. One from two municipal fishermen, who — plot twist — are now doing the government’s job of defending the government’s own regulation, because apparently that’s just how things work in this jurisdiction now.

Act I: The Government Sues Itself, Basically

Here is where it gets good. Buried in the amended Fisheries Code — the same law the tracking rule claims to implement — is a provision that flatly bars courts from issuing restraining orders against the fisheries bureau’s enforcement actions. Not “discouraged.” Not “disfavored absent compelling circumstances.” Barred.

A trial court issued one anyway — first a TRO, then upgraded it to a permanent injunction, seemingly undisturbed by the small matter of a statute telling it not to. The government’s actual legal argument for lifting that injunction leaned on a different, more roundabout theory involving special environmental-case procedure and which court has jurisdiction to issue what. A perfectly serviceable argument. Just not the one sitting in plain text two provisions over.

Somewhere in the Fisheries Code, in black and white, was a provision that could have ended this fight in 2021. Instead, everyone spent eight years litigating around it like it was radioactive.

Act II: SolGen Number One Says Just Comply

Fast forward to 2022. The RTC has already ruled the tracking order unconstitutional. And the government’s own top lawyer — Solicitor General Jose Calida, at the time — issues a formal opinion telling the fisheries bureau and the telecom regulator to stand down and comply with the ruling. While the government’s own appeal is, technically, still pending.

Read that again. The government’s chief litigator told the government’s own agencies to give up mid-fight. That’s not a legal strategy. That’s a coach benching himself at halfime and telling the team to take the loss.

Act III: SolGen Number Two Keeps Fighting, Then Concedes the Whole Point

Enter Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra, who picks the fight back up and takes it all the way to oral arguments in 2023. Commendable persistence. Except that during those very arguments, Guevarra reportedly acknowledged that the tracking system is incapable of detecting overfishing — which is, one might gently point out, the entire reason the tracking system exists.

This is the legal equivalent of your defense attorney standing up in court and saying, “Your Honor, my client’s alibi doesn’t actually hold up, but otherwise we’re doing great.”

Act IV: SolGen Number Three Arrives With An 86-Page Sermon

By 2026, the job belongs to Solicitor General Darlene Berberabe, who files the most combative brief of the trilogy — eighty-six pages, filed August 14, framing the entire dispute as a battle between the Filipino people’s right to a sustainable resource for generations and a few operators’ right to short-term profit. Stirring stuff. Also: the third distinct institutional position the OSG has taken on this exact regulation since 2022. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s stand-down, concede-the-facts, and now full moral crusade — from the same office, on the same rule, within one presidential term and change.

Three officials. Three postures. One case. If the government itself couldn’t stay consistent on whether this regulation mattered, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of how seriously it was defended the first six years.

Where the Government Actually Lost — And It Wasn’t the Argument You Think

Here’s the inconvenient truth for anyone rooting for a triumphant reversal: the Supreme Court didn’t rule that vessel tracking is inherently unconstitutional. It ruled that this particular agency ran a defective process to adopt it. The only scientific study the bureau cited to justify the rule was outdated and was never actually shown to the stakeholders during consultation. And the bureau had already procured the tracking hardware before finalizing the policy that was supposed to require it.

Procurement before policy. Let that sink in. That’s not a constitutional-law problem so much as a “did anyone actually run this consultation or was it theater” problem — and it is exactly the kind of factual finding a motion for reconsideration is least equipped to unwind. You don’t get to relitigate “the study was old and nobody saw it” just by writing more pages about sustainable fisheries.

Meanwhile: The NGO Quietly Exits Stage Left

A smaller, stranger detail: the two municipal fishermen fighting to revive the tracking rule were previously represented alongside Oceana Philippines International, the marine-conservation group that’s been the loudest voice against the ruling. In their new motion, filed the same day as the government’s, Oceana is conspicuously not listed as a co-movant. Just the fishermen and their own counsel. Whether that’s a deliberate move to let the “authentic fisherfolk” voice lead without the NGO-advocacy label commercial operators love to attach to these fights, or something else entirely, is worth watching. Organizations don’t usually step back from a fight they’ve spent years bankrolling without a reason.

The Villains, If You Insist On Villains

The three companies that brought this case aren’t scrappy underdogs. Royale Fishing Corporation has operated out of Malabon since 1985. Bonanza Fishing and Market Resources is a Navotas fixture. RBL Fishing Corporation, founded by brothers who grew up fishing the Cuyo Islands, once ran a fleet pushing a hundred vessels — among the largest in the country. These are not mom-and-pop operations arguing about an overreaching bureaucrat. They are the incumbents of Philippine commercial fishing, and they just beat the government’s flagship anti-overfishing tool on a technicality about consultation paperwork.

The Money Where the Mouth Is

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The government previously warned that gutting the tracking system risks another European Union “yellow card” over illegal fishing — the kind of designation that puts billions of pesos in seafood exports at risk. A global coalition of fisheries-transparency groups is publicly backing both reconsideration motions. And domestically, one conservation group called the original ruling a death blow to small-scale fishing communities, while another warned it leaves regulators effectively blind to which commercial vessels are creeping into waters reserved for small fishers. Everyone agrees the stakes are enormous. Nobody agrees on who’s supposed to fix it, or how, or why it took this long to try.

So, Reader, What Happens Now?

Don’t hold your breath for a dramatic reversal. The Court’s own reasoning here is process-based, not principle-based — which means the realistic outcomes are a narrower, better-consulted tracking system (echoing one justice’s own suggestion that a less intrusive design would do the job), or a denied motion followed by the bureau quietly issuing a redo with an actual paper trail of consultation this time. Either way, the fishing boats currently sailing without anyone watching them aren’t waiting around for the footnotes to get sorted out.

Eight years, three Solicitors General, one statute nobody fully leaned on, and a government that beat itself to the punch more often than any commercial fishing lobbyist ever could. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just what institutional whiplash looks like when nobody’s forced to answer for it.

May the rule of law rise on the third day. 🪨

KWEBA NI BAROK — Where corruption goes to die

Key Citations

A. Legal & Official Sources

Republic v. Royale Fishing Corp. G.R. Nos. 256282, 256559, and 257049. Supreme Court of the Philippines, 21 Jan. 2026. Supreme Court of the Philippines, https://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/256282-256559-257049-republic-of-the-philippines-represented-by-the-department-of-agriculture-the-bureau-of-fisheries-and-aquatic-resources-and-the-national-telecommunications-commission-vs-royale/
Republic of the Philippines. Decision in G.R. Nos. 256282/256559/257049 (Republic v. Royale Fishing Corporation, et al.). Supreme Court of the Philippines, 21 Jan. 2026. https://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/256282.pdf.

Republic of the Philippines. Implementing Rules and Regulations of Republic Act No. 8550 as Amended by Republic Act No. 10654. Department of Agriculture – Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources. https://www.bfar.da.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IRRofRA10654.pdf.