Short answer. Yes. Section 11 gives the Act retroactive effect, so the age of the entry is not an objection — an error recorded decades before the law existed can be corrected under it. The one limit is that the correction must not prejudice or impair vested or acquired rights.
What the law says
This Act shall have retroactive effect insofar as it does not prejudice or impair vested or acquired rights in accordance with the Civil Code and other laws.
RA 9048, Section 11 — Retroactive But Not Prejudicial. Read the full provision →
Retroactivity had to be said out loud
This Act shall have retroactive effect insofar as it does not prejudice or impair vested or acquired rights in accordance with the Civil Code and other laws. Statutes are ordinarily read as operating forward only, so without this clause there would have been a real argument that the administrative route was open only to entries made after the law took effect. That would have excluded almost everyone it was written for. Most people discover a wrong entry decades later, when a passport, a pension, a land transaction or a retirement application forces them to look closely at a certificate they had never read.
The limit, and what it protects
The exception is not about the age of the record but about its consequences. A vested or acquired right is one someone already holds, and the clause refuses to let a correction be used to take it away. The situations that raise it are the ones where an entry has been relied on rather than merely filed — a succession already settled on the strength of a recorded date or name, a title transferred, a benefit granted and received. Where a proposed correction would unsettle something like that, expect resistance, and expect the question to belong before a court rather than a counter.
Nothing else is relaxed
Retroactive reach says only that the law applies to old entries. Everything else still holds. The error must be clerical or typographical as the Act defines that — harmless, apparent, and correctable by reference to other existing records — or else a change of first name on one of the stated grounds. The petition must still be filed in person by someone with direct and personal interest, still be supported by at least two documents showing the correct entry, and still is a petition that may be availed of only once.
Age is an evidentiary problem, not a legal one
In practice the obstacle for a very old entry is almost never Section 11; it is documents. Records from the relevant period may have been lost to fire, flood or simple attrition, and the surviving papers may all have been copied from the erroneous certificate, which proves nothing. Start the search early and go beyond the obvious: school and church records, employment and agency files, old identification documents, insurance and membership papers. If genuinely nothing shows the correct entry, the administrative route closes on that ground, and the remedy becomes judicial.
Related provisions
- RA 9048, Section 2 — Definition Of Terms
- RA 9048, Section 3 — Who May File And Where
- RA 9048, Section 5 — Form Contents And Publication
- RA 9048, Section 11 — Retroactive But Not Prejudicial