Short answer. Yes. Article 1114 allows creditors and all other persons interested in making the prescription effective to avail themselves of it notwithstanding the express or tacit renunciation by the debtor or proprietor. Your debtor's generosity with his own defences does not bind you.
What the law says
Creditors and all other persons interested in making the prescription effective may avail themselves thereof notwithstanding the express or tacit renunciation by the debtor or proprietor.
Civil Code, Article 1114 — Creditors May Invoke Prescription. Read the full provision →
Why a creditor is given this
Prescription a debtor declines to invoke is a defence he is entitled to abandon for himself. The difficulty is that abandoning it enlarges the claims competing with yours against the same assets, and it can be done quietly, by an acknowledgment or a part payment rather than by any formal act. Article 1114 answers that by letting the people whose recovery is affected raise the defence themselves, notwithstanding the express or tacit renunciation by the debtor or proprietor. The waiver binds him. It does not bind you.
“All other persons interested”
The article is not confined to creditors. It extends to all other persons interested in making the prescription effective, which takes in anyone whose position is worsened by the revived claim: a guarantor or surety exposed to the same obligation, a co-debtor, someone holding property that would answer for it, heirs facing a claim against an estate. If you are being asked to pay on an obligation your principal debtor could have resisted and chose not to, this is the first provision to look at.
Two things must be true before it helps
The prescription must actually have been obtained, so the period must have run to completion on the facts. Article 1155 matters here: prescription of actions is interrupted when they are filed before the court, when there is a written extrajudicial demand by the creditor, and when there is a written acknowledgment of the debt by the debtor. A claim demanded in writing along the way may never have prescribed at all. And the debtor's act must be a renunciation rather than something that stopped the period from completing.
Build the timeline from documents
Not from what anyone remembers. The date the obligation fell due, every written demand and its proof of receipt, any acknowledgment or part payment by the debtor and when it was made, and the date the claim was finally brought. Then identify your own interest precisely, as creditor, surety, co-debtor or heir, because the article gives the defence to a person genuinely affected, and the first thing the other side will test is whether you are one of them.
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.
- Alejandro Bayog, et al. vs. Antonio M. Natino, et al, G.R. No. 118691, July 5, 1996 — read the decision on LawPhil →
Related provisions
- Civil Code, Article 1112 — Renouncing Prescription
- Civil Code, Article 1155 — The Three Ways to Interrupt Prescription