China's recent announcement encouraging the public to apply to use the uninhabited islands in the Paracels may extend to the rest of the South China Sea if protest action is not taken, an expert said Monday.
“The Philippines, even if it’s not among the claimants to the Paracels, should file a protest as that is going to escalate the situation in the South China Sea,” University of the Philippines law professor Jay Batongbacal told a forum.
“The Paracels are still in the South China Sea and it’s clear to us that whatever China does in the Paracels, it eventually [will] also do in the Spratlys.”
Batongbacal made his statement even as the defenders of the West Philippine Sea from the Supreme Court, the Senate, the legal and academic communities on Monday closed ranks to call for transparency and integrity in the foreign policy of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.
In a foreign policy forum organized by the Office of Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros in Manila, Acting Chief Justice Antonio Carpio, former Solicitor General Florin Hilbay, former representative Barry Gutierrez, Batongbacal and military historian and security analyst Jose Custodio took turns discussing the government’s foreign policy thrust and framework.
The event, “Kasarinlan: A Philippine Foreign Policy Forum,” coincided with the second anniversary of the Philippines’ historic victory against China before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague on the West Philippine Sea.
Global Times, a Chinese state-run paper, reported on July 5 that Hainan was allowing individuals to use uninhabited islands in the Paracels for “tourism and construction purposes for up to 50 years.”
The Paracel Islands are a group of islands in the South China Sea claimed by China, which calls them Xisha, Vietnam, and Taiwan.
Batongbacal called this development “even more alarming” as it essentially allowed China to use civilians “to do the work of taking over and occupying new features.
“Obviously, if it’s a civilian activity, then it will be very difficult for government forces to respond, and they will be seen as doing aggression, in which case the Chinese will be provoked into taking more drastic measures against the claimants,” he said.
The Philippines does not claim the Paracel Islands, but the entire archipelago is in the range of the bombers that China landed on the isles.
China has already built military bases on some territories in the Spratly Islands with anti-air and anti-ship capabilities.
Duterte has been repeatedly urged by maritime experts to enforce or preserve the Philippines’ arbitral win against China on the contested areas in the West Philippine Sea to preserve the country’s rights over the resources in these areas.
Duterte has so far refused to enforce this monumental ruling that other countries with territorial disputes with China have yet to gain due to the Philippines’ alleged lack of preparedness to defend itself.
