WHILE PRESIDENT Benigno Aquino III may have recently instructed his officials not to disclose further plans on the dispute with China, students and professors of law gathered in a colloquium highlighting legal perspectives on the Philippines’ territorial claims under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) last July 7 at the Ateneo Law School campus in Rockwell, Makati City. Law school Dean Sedfrey Candelaria gave welcoming remarks.

Lowell Bautista, PhD, an Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security research fellow and a member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Wollongong in Australia, explicated the international laws relevant to the current dispute, particularly the issues surrounding Panatag Shoal, also known as Scarborough Shoal.

On the one hand, according to Bautista, the rules of customary international law on the acquisition law of the territory may apply in various ways—one of which is the principle of contiguity, which he clarified has been mistaken as a matter of “common sense” simply because the shoal is closer to the Philippines.

“Even if the Scarborough shoal is closer to us, or just in our backyard, we don’t use that as a basis for [being] a part of our territory,” Bautista said. Other principles he discussed were conquest, cessation and succession, occupation and prescription, acquiescence and protest, critical date, and adjudication and arbitration.

On the other hand, Bautista said that the UNCLOS, also called the Law of the Sea Convention, is important as it serves as the legal framework of all activities in the oceans. He also explained that the states who signed the treaty are assumed to consent to the “compulsory binding dispute settlement” as one of the provisions of UNCLOS.

China has declared in 2006 that it does not accept any provisions of the dispute settlement, since UNCLOS reserves the right of states to opt out of the provision under Article 298 of the Convention.

However, Bautista mentioned that under Article 83, states must negotiate “in a spirit of understanding and cooperation” in order to come up with so-called “arrangements of a practical nature.”

Law school student Micah Saturday Alciso also presented his thesis, “The Delta Sea: Resolving the Overlapping 200 Nautical Mile Exclusive Economic Zones of the Republic of the Philippines and the People’s Republic of China in the West Philippine Sea in light of UNCLOS and Republic Act No. 9522.”

In his thesis, Alciso pointed out loopholes in the baselines of the nine-dotted lines of China. Alciso also shared that bringing the issue to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea will result to the advantage of the Philippines. Alciso asked the media not to disclose specific details of his study.

While it remains uncertain as of the moment how disputes in the West Philippine Sea, also known as the South China Sea, will finally be resolved, not just between China and the Philippines but including other countries in Southeast Asia as well, Bautista said he remains hopeful.

“Observers believe that the South China Sea (West Philippine Sea) disputes are so complex that they should not be resolved by the court or tribunal… But I’m generally an optimistic person by nature so I believe there’s a way. There are many ways,” he concluded.