Palace-endorsed bill cuts RP seas in half

R.P. Waters Redefined: Without firing a shot, our neighbors poaching on our territorial seas and casting covetous eyes on our rich mineral reserve would gain access to our marine resources if a bill certified by Malacanang as urgent were enacted into law.

That is, if Dr. Juan Antonio Socrates Jr., a geologist, is right in saying that House Bill 2031 filed by Rep. Apolinario J. Lozada Jr. would shrink our territorial waters from 520,700 square miles to only 230,000 square miles.

We doubt if a congressman would deliberately sponsor a bill cutting by half our territorial waters, so we think that either Lozada has been asked to sponsor a bill whose implications he did not understand or Socrates does not know what he is talking about.

Either way, it would be best for the two sides to be fully and publicly ventilated before any action is taken on the bill titled "An act defining the archipelagic baselines of the Philippine archipelago to include the Kalayaan Island Group and to conform with the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea."

The bill would amend RA 3046, as amended by RA 5446, defining and protecting our territorial and internal waters. We were told that Lozada’s bill was needed to perfect our commitment to the UNCLOS and thereby seek protection and redress under it.

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Palawan Loses Revenue: The Philippines signed the UNCLOS on Dec. 10, 1982, and deposited its instrument of ratification on May 8, 1984. But we have not formally defined our new baselines under UNCLOS.

Lozada’s bill lists the 149 perimeter points indicating the corners of an irregular area representing our territorial sea. The proposed definition of the area, Socrates said, would shrink the country’s waters by more than half.

Socrates has discussed extensively the ramifications of the bill on Philippine sovereignty, but it seems the officials concerned have not been listening.

That might be because Socrates, who happens to be the provincial health officer of Palawan, sometimes inserts into his discussion his warning that HB 2031 would deprive the Palawan government of its rightful share of royalty payments from the Malampaya natural gas project.

He said that the perimeter points listed in HB 2031 – while shrinking the area of our territorial waters – will move the Malampaya/Camago and the entire petroleum resource field in Palawan from the municipal waters of the province to the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

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Treaty Of Paris Ignored: In its redefinition of the country’s baselines, Socrates added, the bill wreaks havoc on the Treaty of Paris, the original basis for determining the area and location of the colony that was transferred to the United States in 1898 by a vanquished Spain.

HB 2031 will reduce our territorial waters from 520,700 square miles to only 2320,000 square miles, according go Socrates. (Why don’t we measure huge territorial areas in square kilometers and be in step with the metric world?)

It should be easy for the House of Representatives to verify if Socrates was just equating the shrinking of Palawan’s petroleum revenues to the shrinking of the country’s territorial waters.

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UNCLOS Defines Shelf: What are the implications of the redefinition of our baselines under HB 2031? Socrates mentioned two dire consequences:

1. We will be forced to confer on foreign vessels – including tankers, submarines, nuclear-powered ships, aircraft carriers, vessels carrying noxious substances – the right of innocent passage through our waters and air space.

2. We will have to recognize traditional fishing rights and other legitimate activities of our immediate neighbors. (Chinese fishermen and their ambassador will no longer buy Philippine commercial maps from the National Book Store to justify their poaching.)

Under the UNCLOS, coastal states such as the Philippines are automatically entitled to a continental shelf if they can prove that such is theirs and as long as no other sovereign state nearby claims any part of it.

The UNCLOS text defines the continental shelf of a coastal state as comprising "the sea-bed and subsoil of the submarine areas that extend beyond its territorial sea throughout the natural prolongation of its land territory to the outer edge of the continental margin, or to a distance of 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured where the outer edge of the continental margin does not extend up to that distance."

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Part Of Palawan Shelf: If it can be shown that the geology of the natural elongation and the state’s landmass are the same, they will be considered as one mass regardless of how far the submerged shelf stretches out from shore.

Socrates said that both the Spratlys and Malampaya/Camago are on the continental shelf of Palawan. The geology of the Spratlys, Malampaya/Camago and Palawan from Ulugan Bay to Busuanga is the same, he added, because they are all on a microcontinent called the "North Palawan Continental Terrane.’

"Our oil fields of the past, our gas fields of the present and our vast petroleum resources of the future are all there," he said.

(We can almost hear the critics of American activities in the South exclaiming, "So that’s why these American forces had been sent to the area!")

He recalled that the Geological Society of the Philippines itself declared in 2001 that the geology underneath the Kalayaan Island Group (aka Spratlys) is identical to that of mainland Palawan, because the former is formed over the thinned continental margin of the latter.

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R.P. Position Jeopardized: Socrates said: "By virtue of Article 76, Paragraph 1, of the UNCLOS, and Section 7.3.1 of the scientific and technical guidelines for determining the continental shelf, Kalayaan is an integral part of the Philippine continental shelf, since it is a natural prolongation of the Palawan landmass."

The foot of the continental slope is still located west of Kalayaan. From this point, he added, the Philippine continental shelf can be extended 60 nautical miles farther west toward the South China Sea.

HB 2031 places the entire Philippine petroleum resource field in the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone. Such move, Socrates warned, will abdicate the position taken by the Philippine delegations to the relevant international legal forums and negotiations involving the territorial base of Philippine statehood.

Congress said in 1984 in connection with the ratification of the UNCLOS that our "signing of the convention shall not in any manner impair or prejudice the sovereign rights of the Republic of the Philippines under and arising from the Constitution of the Philippines," and that it "shall not in any manner affect the sovereign rights of the Republic of the Philippines as successor of the United States of America under and arising out of the Treaty of Paris between Spain and the United States of America of Dec. 10, 1898."

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Mine The Shelf Or EEZ?: Socrates said that "under the UNCLOS, there is a difference between the regime of the EEZ and the regime of the continental shelf. This can be interpreted to mean that UNCLOS allows the mining of resources of the sea’s subsoil only in the continental shelf, not in the EEZ.

If enacted into law, he warned, HB 2031 will open the Philippines to counterclaims in relation not only to the Spratlys but also to the Malampaya/Camago resource field and other undiscovered hydrocarbon deposits in the continental shelf of Palawan.

A constitutional convention and not a mere act of Congress, he pointed out, is required to surrender the territorial legacy of the people of the Philippines.

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