IN the last few years of his term, President Duterte can still fulfill his promise to the Filipino people to raise the UN arbitral tribunal award in the Philippines’s case against China on the South China Sea—this time, doing so “not before Chinese President Xi Jinping, but before the world.”
Former Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario made this suggestion during a webinar on Tuesday on “A New Regional Order: Effective Alignment through Strategic Partnership,” organized by the Stratbase ADR Institute to mark the fourth anniversary of Manila’s victory in the UN body.
Del Rosario saidthe first order of business is to take the award off the shelf, and raise it “before the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly [UNGA] this coming September 2020.”
He said this will be an opportune moment because the theme of the upcoming UNGA session is the commitment to multilateralism.
“This is when the leaders of 193 countries will troop to the UN to promote their positions before the global community of nations. This is when we will rely on the UN General Assembly to serve as not only the primary promoter of the rule of law but also the court of world public opinion.”
Although the Philippines won the award in 2016 under the Aquino administration, President Duterte shelved the award when he assumed the presidency, in favor of a closer friendship with China in the hope that his multibillion infrastructure program, called “Build, Build, Build,” would get a fresh infusion of financial support, del Rosario recalled.
However, China continued its aggressive behavior in the West Philippine Sea, even when Duterte adoped a two-pronged foreign policy of putting the award in the back burner, while pursuing cooperation with the Asian giant.
In the past four years, China continued to militarize the features it had turned into island fortresses and Filipino fishermen complained of being driven out of their traditional fishing grounds, being continually harassed, and, at one point, having a fishing boat hit and abandoned, and leaving the occupants to the mercy of the sea.
Chinese military ships, during faceoff in the South China Sea (SCS) last April, “illuminated a Philippine ship with fire-control radar,” which suggests the imminent launch of weapons, prompting a diplomatic protest by the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin Jr. recently warned of “the strongest reponse” possible if the Chinese naval military drills in the waters off the Paracels archipelago from July 1 to 5, spills over into Philippine territory. Vietnam claims the Paracels.
Del Rosario’s second proposal is to consolidate support and assistance from the US, Australia, EU, Japan, Asean and other responsible nations.
He said most of the countries around the world believe in the Rule of Law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), “and these countries believe that the enforcement of the Award is the legitimate process of resolving the maritime dispute in the South China Sea, not China’s method of bullying and deceit.”
The former ambassador has a third option: making Chinese officials criminally accountable “for having inflicted the most massive, near-permanent and devastating destruction of the marine wealth in the South China Sea.”
He urged citizens of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei “to submit similar communications to the ICC because they too have been affected by China’s systematic and wanton environmental destruction.”
Fourth, he said, China must be made to pay monetarily for their criminal behavior, after it “mercilessly destroyed the breeding grounds of fish and other marine life in the Spratlys.”
Over half of 110 million Filipinos “live in coastal communities, relying on marine resources for their daily needs. Where will we get our food when we run out of fish?” he asked.
Del Rosario’s fifth suggestion is for the country “to develop a minimum credible defense posture, rejoin our partners in conducting joint patrols in the South China Sea and work to strengthen our alliance with the US.”
He said as a self-respecting country, we need the capacity to protect our territory and defend ourselves against external threats like China’s incursions, as mandated by our Constitution.
While consistent in opposing war, he said, “but if threatened by the use of force, we should be ready to inflict, at the very least, a bloody nose on any attacker who is out to harm us.”
MDT affirmed
He welcomed the recent clarification by the US as to when the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) can be invoked, saying that last year, US State Secretary Mike Pompeo declared that “as the South China Sea is part of the Pacific, any armed attack on any Philippine forces, aircraft, or public vessels in the South China Sea will trigger mutual defense obligations under…our Mutual Defense Treaty.”
On Tuesday, Del Rosario said, Pompeo added the following: “The United States champions a free and open Indo-Pacific. Today we are strengthening US policy in a vital, contentious part of the region—the South China Sea.”
Tuesday’s Stratbase webinar was joined by key diplomats, among them Vietnamese Ambassador Nguyen Vu Tung, who now invoked Unclos “as a legal referee.” He believes that the “Constitution of the Oceans”—which today embodies the Rule of Law in the world’s oceans and sea, could be carried over to finally help draft the long-delayed Code of Conduct, which would spell out how claimants in the South China Sea should behave toward other claimants.
“Unclos could be the weapon of the weak,” Ambassador Vung, noting small nations that could not stand up militarily against the Asian giant can turn to this.
Former Japanese Ambassador Kazuo Kodama, who sent a recording, said “history tells us that when vacuum of power persists, China fills them.” “The world is now preoccupied with the fight against the coronavirus, and China is squeezing the opportunity with a heightened sense of urgency in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Hong Kong.”
Ambasssador Kazuo said the current declaration of conduct (DOC) is a great document that “can be converted to COC [code of conduct] easily with some additional legally binding words,” adding, in that sense, “you can conclude the COC negotiations overnight.”
According to Kazuo, the lengthy negotiations concerning the COC are not favorable for peace and security in the SCS, as “it provides China with time to build up military capabilities.”
Kazuo highly endorsed the concept of FOIP, “free and open Indo-Pacific, a concept developed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
“Governments should express support along the line of a free and open indo-Pacific, whose main concept is the confluence of two seas, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, as international public goods and a multilateral pursuit with our Asean friends.”
Kazuo said they congratulated the Philippines’s victory in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, viewing it as “the most authentic way to peacefully solve the dispute despite the adverse reaction from China.” China, he added, was expected to disregard the ruling, “as a strategy and divert world attention to from the Philippines and let the public forget it.”
Kazuo said it was therefore, “absolutely necessary for the Philippines, Japan and other like-minded countries like the US and Australia to demand this historic ruling and call on its importance whenever possible.”
He said Japan was concerned when China developed the Xisha and Nansha islands or the Paracels and Spratly islands because, he said, “China breached the law almost daily around the Senkaku Islands, [Diaou in Chinese],” referring to the islands Japan claims but China disputes.
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