On the baselines bills
I believe that the archipelagic baselines bills filed in both chambers of Congress were sincerely intended and crafted out of intellectual honesty. I won’t say anything derogatory to the authors of the bills, except that they separately treat the archipelagic problem, particularly what are the boundaries of our national territory in a piecemeal manner. They pick certain provisions from the UNCLOS and then they try to apply it in their bills. You can’t do that.
The Philippines is a geographical archipelago, but if it makes a declaration that it is an archipelagic state, immediately we lose our rights to our internal waters. They will become in effect a highway for foreign vessels. Secondly, we would lose our right to protect our local fishermen from poaching of foreign vessels. These are just examples. There are many consequences of a declaration of an archipelagic state.
So first we must talk to the experts, meaning the scientists familiar with the measurements of the maritime boundaries. And we must talk with the legal experts, if possible officials in the foreign affairs connected with the negotiation of the UNCLOS.
I am not necessarily against those bills but I think it is premature to act on them at this time since the bills happen to include the Kalayaan Island Group and other disputed islands within the baselines.
Even the international limits in the Treaty of Paris do not include those disputed islands within our territorial boundaries. In doing so, the bills constitute a violation or at least a disregard of the 2002 ASEAN-China Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. That could be considered an offensive act of aggression by China.
On some senators on the doubting the legality of JPEPA’s conditional concurrence
I simply have to educate them. They are afraid because they don’t know about it. Fear is usually the result of ignorance. They’ve never had any experience with it. But in the United States, they have been practicing it since the 19th century and nobody has ever objected. The United States has entered into treaties with the world’s greatest powers, especially with Russia during the Cold War, and Russia never objected.
I know that a colleague has issued a press release, which I view as entirely unfortunate. He has fallen into the trap a freshman normally would. When you read for example the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, you have to be aware that the Vienna Convention is not a codification of general international law. It is not as if you are reading the Revised Penal Code, that if you don’t find it there, then it is not allowed by law. That is not the case with an international treaty particularly when it is multilateral in nature.
In any event, this is a very technical matter and I would be happy to educate my colleagues at this point. I think it is unfortunate to muddy the waters this early. The only question here is can we explain why Jpepa is advantageous to the Philippines during the plenary debate. Thereafter, we can proceed with subsidiary question of its procedural niceties.