Short answer. Yes. Philippine law lets any single co-owner sue to eject an intruder or a former occupant from co-owned property, without needing the other co-owners to join the case. The recovery is understood to benefit the whole co-ownership, not just the co-owner who filed it.
What the law says
Any one of the co-owners may bring an action in ejectment.
Civil Code, Article 487 — Ejectment by a Co-owner. Read the full provision →
The rule is short, and it says exactly what it means
Article 487 of the Civil Code is a single sentence: any one of the co-owners may bring an action in ejectment. A co-owner does not need the written consent of the other co-owners, and does not need to bring them into the case as co-plaintiffs, to sue someone who is wrongfully occupying or withholding co-owned property. This exists because requiring every co-owner to act together before anyone can protect the property would leave it vulnerable whenever even one co-owner is absent, unreachable, or unwilling to cooperate.
Who the co-owner can sue under this rule
This covers a co-owner suing an outside intruder as well as a co-owner suing someone whose right to occupy — a former tenant, a buyer whose sale fell through, a family member allowed to stay temporarily — has ended. The action is understood to be brought for the benefit of all the co-owners, not as a personal claim of the one who filed it, since the property being recovered remains co-owned property, not the sole property of the plaintiff.
It does not erase the interests of the other co-owners
A single co-owner filing alone does not mean that co-owner is acting as though the property were entirely theirs. The recovery still belongs to the co-ownership as a whole, and the other co-owners' shares are neither enlarged nor diminished by one co-owner having taken the initiative to sue. This is a procedural convenience for protecting the property, not a substantive change in who owns what share of it.
Why one co-owner is enough
The provision says any one of the co-owners may bring an action in ejectment. That wording is deliberate. Requiring a co-owner to assemble every other co-owner before defending the property against an outsider would, in practice, often mean no action at all. The suit is understood to be brought for the benefit of the co-ownership as a whole, so recovering possession benefits all the co-owners and not only the one who filed. What a lone co-owner cannot do is litigate to the exclusion of the others, or use the action to claim the property as exclusively theirs.
Cases citing this provision
These Supreme Court decisions cite the provision above. We list them so you can read them yourself; the summaries of what each decided are not ours to give.
- Arnelito Adlawan vs. Emeterio M. Adlawan, et al, G.R. No. 161916, January 20, 2006 — read the decision on LawPhil →
- Perlita Mabalo vs. Heirs of Roman Babuyo, represented by Virgilio L. Babuyo, G.R. No. 238468, July 6, 2022 — read the decision on LawPhil →
- Roger V. Navarro vs. Hon. Jose L. Escobido, Presiding Judge, RTC, Branch 37, Cagayan de Oro City, and Karen T. Go, doing business under the name Kargo Enterprises, G.R. No. 153788, November 27, 2009 — read the decision on LawPhil →
- Nieves Plasabas, et al. vs. Dominador Lumen, et al, G.R. No. 166519, March 31, 2009 — read the decision on LawPhil →