Short answer. Yes. Article 704 caps private abatement at three thousand pesos — the value of what you destroy to remove a public nuisance specially injurious to you must not exceed that amount, and several other conditions must also be met before you may act on your own.
What the law says
That the value of the destruction does not exceed three thousand pesos
Civil Code, Article 704 — Private Abatement Of Public Nuisance. Read the full provision →
Private abatement is allowed, but tightly conditioned
Article 704 lets any private person abate a public nuisance which is specially injurious to him, by removing or, if necessary, destroying the thing that constitutes it, without committing a breach of the peace, or doing unnecessary injury. This is a real, self-help remedy — but the article immediately qualifies it with four conditions that must all be satisfied, one of which sets the value cap you are asking about.
The three-thousand-peso ceiling
The fourth condition is explicit: private abatement is only available that the value of the destruction does not exceed three thousand pesos. If removing or destroying the offending thing would cost more than that amount in value, self-help abatement under this article is not available to you regardless of how the other conditions are met — the remedy is scaled to relatively modest destruction, not to large-scale demolition or removal.
The other conditions that must also be met
The value cap does not stand alone. Article 704 also requires that demand be first made upon the owner or possessor of the property to abate the nuisance, that such demand has been rejected, and that the abatement be approved by the district health officer and executed with the assistance of the local police. All four conditions — prior demand, rejection of that demand, official approval and police assistance, and the value ceiling — must be satisfied together before private abatement is proper; meeting the value limit alone does not authorize you to act.
Why the law builds in these safeguards
Letting private individuals destroy property, even property that constitutes a nuisance, carries obvious risk of abuse or overreach. Article 704's combination of a monetary ceiling, a prior-demand-and-rejection requirement, and mandatory official involvement is designed to keep this remedy limited to situations where the harm is real, the owner has had a fair chance to fix it himself, and the response is proportionate and independently supervised rather than a purely private judgment call about what needs to be destroyed.
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.
- Natividad C. Cruz and Benjamin Dela Cruz vs. Pandacan Hiker's Club, Inc, G.R. No. 188213, January 11, 2016 — read the decision on LawPhil →