Duterte terribly wrong — or just diabolically clever — in his arbitration statements at UN
PERHAPS it was a classic instance of following an aphorism in Sun Tzu’s Art of War: “The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.”
Do we want President Rodrigo Duterte to enforce arbitration award, which ruled that our islands are mere rocks with no 200-mile exclusive economic zone, just a small 12-mile territorial zone? “An arbitral award, as any decision by an international court or tribunal, does not cast international law in stone. Unlike most domestic legal systems, international law does not know of a hierarchically organized judiciary with a single highest court at the apex. On the contrary, even the decisions of the International Court of Justice have no binding force except between the parties and in respect of the particular case at hand.
Indeed, more than four years since the arbitral panel handed down its award, Duterte’s refusal to act on any provision of the award has made it what is called in legal systems a “dead letter,” a law or parts of a law that is ignored or is not enforced for various reasons. Third, yes, the award declared that the nine-dash line encompassing most of the South China Sea shown in Chinese maps as without basis in international law. But China’s claim over the Spratlys is not based on this nine-dash line, but on several other developments in the modern era as well as its declarations of sovereignty through several of its laws.
The Yellows and ignorant writers yelling for Duterte to implement the award don’t really know what they are talking about.Do they want Duterte to declare that our Pag-asa and seven other islands in the Kalayaan Island Group are no longer islands entitled to a 200-nautical-mile EEZ, but are merely “rocks” with a small 12-nautical-mile territorial sea and “low-tide elevations”?
An example of this rather Catch-22 situation is the tribunal’s conclusion that China built an artificial island in Mischief Reef “without the authorization of the Philippines.”
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