PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s speech at the 21st IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 31 was a cogent and firm statement of the Philippines' position on the South China Sea and the need to maintain peace and stability in the region by upholding international law.
First, he emphasized that Filipinos are a peaceful people, committed to the values that engender amity, fraternity and sovereign equality among nations.
He then reaffirmed our people's adherence to international law.
"Our commitment to peace and to the rule of law inheres in how we have defined our sovereign home," Marcos said. "When we established our Commonwealth in 1935, we put together a Constitution that defined our territory in accordance with the international treaties that became the basis of our archipelagic unity."
The Philippines, he said, put forward the archipelagic doctrine, which defines the waters around, between and connecting the different islands of the Philippine archipelago as integral parts of Philippine territory subject to its exclusive sovereignty, regardless of the width or dimensions of these waters.
This doctrine has since been enshrined in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), which also clarified the limits of each state's maritime zones and defined the extent to which they could exercise sovereignty, their sovereign rights and jurisdiction over those zones.
"Accordingly, we have made a conscious effort to align our definition of our territory and our maritime zones with what international law permits and recognizes. This has been inscribed in Article 1 of our Constitution," Marcos said.
This, he said, was in stark contrast to assertive actions that aim to propagate excessive and baseless claims through force, intimidation and deception.
"In the West Philippine Sea, we are on the frontlines of efforts to assert the integrity of the Unclos as a Constitution of the Oceans," Marcos said.
"We have defined our territory and maritime zones in a manner befitting a responsible and law-abiding member of the international community. We have submitted our assertions to rigorous legal scrutiny by the world's leading jurists," he said.
"So, the lines that we draw on our waters are not derived from just our imagination, but from international law," he said. "We have on our side the 1982 Unclos and the binding 2016 Arbitral Award, which affirm what is ours by legal right."
"In this solid footing and through our clear moral ascendancy, we find the strength to do whatever it takes to protect our sovereign home — to the last square inch, to the last square millimeter," the President said.
"The life-giving waters of the West Philippine Sea flow in the blood of every Filipino. We cannot allow anyone to detach it from the totality of the maritime domain that renders our nation whole," he said.
But the Philippines is not only protecting its patrimony, rights and dignity as a free country, he said. We are also firm in our commitment to regional and global peace.
"In 1982, we led our global community in unanimously adopting the Manila Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes," the President said. "This affirmed that differences amongst nations must always be solved peacefully, through legal and diplomatic processes, [and] never through the threat or the use of force."
Throughout his address, Marcos did not mention China; he didn't have to. Over the past months, the world has witnessed how China, itself a signatory of Unclos, has continuously violated Article 56 of the nautical law — which defines parameters for establishing a nation's exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which extends 200 nautical miles from its coastline — by harassing Filipino vessels in the Philippines' EEZ.
Amid these challenges, there are three points in the country's "abiding compass," Marcos said.
First, the sovereign equality of states must remain sacrosanct. Second, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and Asean-led processes must remain central. And third, the rule of law and the integrity of multilateralism must prevail.
It is the kind of statement at an international forum that Marcos' predecessor should have delivered to uphold the nation's sovereignty but failed to due to his obsession with appeasing China — and his open hostility against the country's traditional allies.
Efforts from some quarters to now paint Marcos as a warmonger reflect the kind of war-or-appeasement mentality that his predecessor favored. They also play into Beijing's objective to gain full control of the South China Sea, to the detriment of our own national interest.
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