Sen. Risa Hontiveros —Senate PRIB
Sen. Risa Hontiveros on Friday called on President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to review the country’s diplomatic relations with China after it disrespected the Philippines when it claimed that the historic arbitral court victory against Beijing was “masterminded” by the United States.
“This is an affront to the Filipinos who stood up for ourselves and had the heart, courage and fighting spirit to take China to court,” Hontiveros said in a statement.
In 2013, Manila challenged Beijing’s sweeping claims to nearly the entire South China Sea with its so-called nine-dash line demarcation before an international arbitral tribunal in The Hague.
On July 12, 2016, the tribunal ruled to invalidate China’s claims and upheld the country’s sovereign rights over its 370-kilometer exclusive economic zone, waters that include the West Philippines Sea.
“If China keeps ignoring the arbitral ruling, the Marcos administration should seriously consider reviewing our national policy toward China,” Hontiveros said.
Beijing, through a statement by its embassy in Manila, belittled the ruling on the day that Filipinos marked the seventh anniversary of the arbitral court’s decision.
It insisted that the ruling was “illegal, null and void” and accused the United States, the Philippines’ longtime treaty ally, of orchestrating it.
“As the mastermind behind the South China Sea arbitration, the US ropes in allies to play up the issue each year on the anniversary of the illegal award to gang up against China and to exert pressure, and force China into accepting the award. We are firmly against this,” the Chinese Embassy statement said.
Smarting from the affront, Hontiveros demanded that the Chinese Embassy should “at least show some basic courtesy to the Philippines” as its host country.
She blasted the embassy for making “inflammatory statements on a day the Filipino people are celebrating a great victory.”
China, the senator added, was only isolating itself from the rest of the world by disregarding the international community’s call on all parties to respect the arbitral ruling.
“The world has spoken,” Hontiveros said. “(T)he territorial claims embodied in the so-called ‘nine-dash line’ have no basis in history or international law.”
“China’s call for the rest of the world to stay out of the territorial dispute in the West Philippine Sea and respect its ‘territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests’ is the height of hypocrisy,” she said.
According to Hontiveros, China has been disrespecting the “sovereignty, rights and interests” of other countries with overlapping ownership claims in the disputed sea region.
Exploring options
Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra said on Thursday that his office was exploring other avenues to strengthen the country’s sovereign rights over its waters.
“I constituted a special team of solicitors to study further courses of legal action with respect to the West Philippine Sea, so that we may guide the DFA (Department of Foreign Affairs) and the President about it,” he said in a text message to reporters.
Guevarra was responding to a request for comment on former Supreme Court Associate Justice Francis Jardeleza’s suggestion to file another arbitral case against China, this time in the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Itlos) because of Beijing’s intransigence and continued aggressive acts by the Chinese in the South China Sea.
The Inquirer asked Guevarra to specify what “further legal course” his office was considering. He did not respond as of this writing.
More cases
Bayan Muna chair Neri Colmenares in a statement on Thursday agreed with Jardeleza’s suggestion.
“Another challenge and possible victory against the nine-dash line could make China’s narrative almost impossible to deploy,” he said.
Colmenares added a suggestion that other countries involved in the maritime dispute with China like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei to file their own arbitration cases in The Hague or in Itlos.
“Such arbitration cases, could encourage China to abandon its obstructionist frame in the CoC (Code of Conduct) talks especially if it loses in a series of arbitration and judicial proceedings that declares the NDL (nine-dash line) baseless under international law,” he said.
‘No longer contestable’
Foreign Undersecretary Theresa Lazaro said on Wednesday that “the [arbitral] award is no longer contestable and is beyond compromise.”
“It is now part of international law. We firmly reject attempts to deliberately diminish or undermine the award’s definitive legal effects in international law,” she added.
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