Short answer. Yes. Under Article 1154, the time during which a fortuitous event prevented you from enforcing your right is not counted against the prescriptive period. The clock stops while the force majeure lasts and resumes only when the obstacle is removed — the lost time is not forfeited.
What the law says
The period during which the obligee was prevented by a fortuitous event from enforcing his right is not reckoned against him.
Civil Code, Article 1154 — Fortuitous Events Suspend the Period. Read the full provision →
What Article 1154 does
Prescription is the rule that a right to sue expires after a set number of years. Article 1154 carves out an important protection: if a fortuitous event — a calamity, typhoon, declaration of national emergency, or any comparable event completely beyond your control — physically or legally stopped you from going to court, that period of incapacity is not counted against you. The prescriptive clock is suspended, not reset. Once the obstacle clears, the remaining time you had before the event continues to run from where it left off.
What counts as a fortuitous event
A fortuitous event is one that is independent of the will of the obligee, impossible to foresee or impossible to avoid even if foreseen, and the cause of the impossibility of performance or enforcement. Natural disasters are the clearest examples, but government-declared states of calamity or emergency that physically shut down courts or prevented travel to file a case can also qualify. Ordinary inconvenience, financial difficulty, or simple delay in engaging a lawyer does not rise to the level of a fortuitous event. The prevention must be genuine and attributable to the calamity itself.
How the suspension works in practice
Suppose your claim is subject to a four-year period and you were two years into that period when a major typhoon hit and courts in your area were closed for three months. Those three months are not counted against your four years. When courts reopened, you still had two full years remaining — the same amount you had before the typhoon struck. This is different from a prescription being interrupted, which resets the entire period. Suspension merely pauses the clock and resumes it from the same point.
The burden of showing prevention
If you want to rely on Article 1154, you will need to show that the fortuitous event actually prevented you from enforcing your right during that specific period — not merely that it caused inconvenience or that it occurred somewhere in the country. Courts look at whether the calamity affected the place where the action had to be filed, whether courts were actually closed or inaccessible, and whether the obligee had reasonable alternatives. Documentation of the calamity, official proclamations, and records of court closures strengthen a suspension argument considerably.
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.
- Sps. Cesar A. Larrobis, Jr., et al. vs. Philippine Veterans Bank, G.R. No. 135706, October 1, 2004 — read the decision on LawPhil →
- Alfonso T. Yuchengco, vs. Republic of the Philippines, PCGG, Estate of Ferdinand E. Marcos, Prime Holdings, Inc., Estate of Ramon U. Cojuangco and Imelda O. Cojuangco, G.R. No. 131127, June 8, 2000 — read the decision on LawPhil →