‘Phl chose right course in sea row’

MANILA, Philippines - The Philippines chose the right course, an international think tank said of the country’s filing a case before an arbitral court on its overlapping claim with China in the Spratlys.

The Philippines may face repercussions for bringing its territorial dispute with China before an international court but complacency may be costlier, US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said in a report.

Gregory Poling of the CSIS in Washington said the submission of the memorial or written argument on the Philippines’ position to the arbitral tribunal in The Hague on March 30 “marks a bold step by Manila and one that Beijing seems to have believed never would actually happen.”

The nearly 4,000-page memorial explains in detail the Philippines’ arguments and evidence against China’s nine-dash line and other aspects of Beijing’s expansive and excessive South China Sea claims.

“Manila is paying a cost for its case, but it has correctly determined that the cost of complacency would be higher,” he said.

“The Philippines chose the right course. Now the international community must weigh in and convince China of that fact,” Poling said in a commentary.

China has rejected arbitration and even threatened the Philippines with sanctions for filing the memorial.

Poling said Manila has learned lessons from China’s intimidation, including the latter’s seizure of Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal and its effort to prevent Philippine ships from delivering supplies and provisions to a handful of Marines stationed at a grounded transport ship on Ayungin Shoal.

“The incident underscored a lesson that the Philippines learned well after Scarborough Shoal: China has no intention of compromising on its claims, restricting them to the bounds of international law, or treating fellow claimants as equal parties to the disputes,” he added.

Poling said there is a flaw in Beijing’s position that it is only claiming “islands and adjacent waters” within its nine-dash line.

He said Ayungin Shoal, called Ren’ai Reef by the Chinese, is not an island or even a rock but a low-tide elevation that is not subject to any independent territorial claim under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

“The shoal belongs to whoever has sovereignty over the continental shelf on which it rests – by all indications the Philippines,” he said.

Poling said China has not restricted its underwater claims to the continental shelf of the Philippines.

He cited an incident in January involving three Chinese ships that patrolled James Shoal, a completely submerged feature on Malaysia’s continental shelf, and held a ceremony swearing to defend Chinese sovereignty over it.

While China makes tenuous legal arguments for its claims to Scarborough Shoal and disputed islets in the Spratlys, Beijing offers none for its claims to Ayungin Shoal or James Shoal, Poling said.

“Such claims, along with increasingly aggressive tactics by Chinese maritime forces, have pushed more complacent nations closer to the Philippine position,” he said.

“Malaysian officials have grown increasingly vocal in meetings with ASEAN counterparts since the Chinese patrols at James Shoal. Even in Indonesia, which had previously tried to distance itself from the dispute, officials appear to be growing concerned,” he added.

An Indonesian official acknowledged on March 12 that China’s nine-dash line overlaps Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone north of the Natuna Islands.

Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa would later temper such statement but reiterated that Indonesia considers the nine-dash line unacceptable.

Negotiations, Poling said, have failed so far to make much progress on managing, much less resolving, the South China Sea disputes.

“No other claimant has the military capabilities to resist determined Chinese aggression, the Philippines least of all. And the United States will not intervene militarily except in the case of an outright act of war,” he said. “That leaves the Philippines only one recourse – the law.”

Poling said many of the Philippines’ neighbors – including Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam – have vouched for Manila’s right to pursue legal action but have shied away from more forthright support for the arbitration case. Extra-regional players have been more vocal, especially Japan and the US.

The US has been more explicit in its criticism of the nine-dash line this year, with Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel even calling it illegal during an appearance in US Congress.

On the same day that the Philippines filed its memorial, the US State Department issued a press statement supporting the effort for “greater legal certainty and compliance with the international law of the sea.”

Nearly every nation, including China, is a signatory to UNCLOS and even those that have not ratified it – including the US – operate under its rules, according to Poling.

“If China, by virtue of size or force of arms, is free to ignore that framework, then the entire edifice risks being discredited. And no nation, China included, would find its security and prosperity better served by a return to the pre-twentieth-century system of might-makes-right relations,” Poling said.

Earlier, Chinese embassy Charge d’Affaires Sun Xiangyang said his country was “deeply disturbed” by the Philippines’ filing of the memorial as negotiations had not been exhausted.

He belittled the effectiveness of international arbitration, saying even big countries like the US had rejected its jurisdiction over serious matters.

Sun reiterated China’s standard line that disputes should be settled bilaterally.

“Beijing maintains that it will not abide by any such ruling. The Philippines can only hope to protect its interests by pursuing the case anyway,” Poling said.

“That leaves the international community, and the United States in particular, to convince China that preserving the international rule of law and playing the part of a responsible power will serve its interests better than will thumbing its nose at the community of nations,” he added.

Meanwhile, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hong Lei assailed Tokyo’s release of its so-called Diplomatic Blue Book 2014 outlining Japan’s territorial claims, including the one over Senkaku or Diaoyu islands.

“Japan’s newly released Diplomatic Blue Book maliciously hypes up the so-called ‘China threat,’ willfully smears China and makes unreasonable accusation against China in disregard of basic facts,” Hong said.