Upper hand

If Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio is correct in his assessment, we can expect the international tribunal hearing the Philippines’ case against China over disputed territory in the West Philippine Sea to decide in our favor.

That's because when the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that it has jurisdiction over the case, it practically ignored China’s so-called nine-dash line, according to Carpio.

How? The tribunal called Scarborough Shoal “merely a rock above water at high tide and incapable of sustaining human habitation of its own. Thus, Scarborough Shoal is entitled only to a 12 nautical mile territorial sea, and not to an EEZ (exclusive economic zone) or ECS (extended continental shelf).”

For Carpio, this means China’s nine-dash line “do(es) not generate maritime zones that can overlap with Philippine EEZ or ECS. This implies that if Scarborough Shoal is merely a rock, the Philippines has a full 200 nautical miles EEZ in the northern sector, excluding territorial sea of Scarborough Shoal.”

China's insistence on the nine-dash claim, in fact, violates the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 2002 ASEAN-China Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. In this Declaration, China along with member-countries of the ASEAN, agreed that the dispute should be resolved “in accordance with universally recognized principles of international law, including the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.”

In other words, by its recent actions in the South China Sea, including artificial island-building, China is turning its back on its previous recognition of the validity of UNCLOS and binding international agreements.

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