International legal forum is the only option for the Philippines in pursuing its claim over the disputed West Philippine Sea, according to a senior magistrate of the Supreme Court.
Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio said the decision of The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which sources said could be released next month, is the only way by which the country could win the dispute.
“The only forum where we can bring the dispute where we can possibly win is the legal forum. We need the ruling to start all our programs on the West Philippine Sea,” Carpio said, in his speech before the Philippine Press Institute event at the Century Park Hotel in Manila.
Carpio, who was part of the Philippine delegation that argued before the tribunal in July last year, expects the PCA to “purely base [the decision] on the law of the seas.”
According to him, war with China is definitely not an option for the government.
“We will not start the war we know we will lose… If we remain in our right mind, we will not start a war with China,” he stressed.
The SC justice stressed that the government should remain in its tactic to pursue the case in the legal forum while “China wants to win this battle without firing a shot, just by intimidating us.”
Nonetheless, he admitted that a ruling favorable to the Philippines would be hard to enforce.
“There is no world policeman to draw out the Chinese in the [disputed] area,” he said, adding that even the US cannot also be expected to enforce the ruling as an ally of the Philippines.
Carpio had been publicly discussing the West Philippine Sea issue in a number of his speeches since 2013.
He believes that China’s claim to a “historical right” to the waters enclosed within the nine-dash line in the South China Sea is utterly without basis under international law.
He pointed out that Unclos had extinguished all historical rights of other states within the 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zone of the adjacent coastal state. This, he said, was why this 200 NM zone is called ‘exclusive’ – no state other than the adjacent coastal state can exploit economically its resources.
China claims that Scarborough Shoal, which it branded Huangyan Island, is the Nanhai island that the 13th century Chinese astronomer-engineer-mathematician Guo Shoujing allegedly visited in 1279 on order of Kublai Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, to conduct a survey of the Four Seas to update the Sung Dynasty calendar system.
This supposed visit of Gou Shoujing to Scarborough Shoal in 1279 is the only historical link that China claims to Scarborough Shoal.
But the magistrate observed that China already used the same claim in another territorial dispute – against Vietnam over Paracels groups of islands.
He also cited a January 30, 1980 document entitled “China’s Sovereignty Over Xisha and Zhongsa Islands Is Indisputable” and published in Beijing Review, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially declared that the Nanhai island that Guo Shoujing visited in 1279 was in Xisha or what is internationally called the Paracels, a group of islands more than 380 NM from Scarborough Shoal.
Carpio said it is puzzling how Guo Shoujing went ashore to “visit” Scarborough Shoal when “it was just a rock, with no vegetation, and did not even have enough space to accommodate an expedition party.”
The SC justice also argued that a state could only claim “historical rights” over waters that are part of its internal waters or territorial sea.
Lastly, the SC justice said China failed to satisfy any of the conditions to claim historical rights under the general principles and rules of international law: formal announcement to the internationalcommunity, continuous exercise of sovereignty over the waters it claims as its own internal waters or territorial sea, and recognition and tolerance from other states.
He added that China’s 9-dashed line claim was “never effectively enforced.”
Carpio wrote the SC decision that unanimously affirmed the constitutionality of the Philippine Archipelagic Baselines law of 2009.
The Baselines Law was passed to beat the deadline of the UN UNCLOS, where a country’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is determined to extend outward from that country’s baselines.