William Hung
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2013
- Messages
- 2,465
- Reaction score
- 16
But China own and manage SCS islands not begenning at modern world, we have historical rights. Our buddhistm came back from India through SCS, our fleet went to Indian ocean ( West Ocean we ever call it ) through SCS. Our long long history have enough detailed files recording SCS islands and our fishermen on the SCS islands were the first Chinamen met with European maritime venture via SCS.
You ignore the most importance aspect, the PAC judges have no means to face it: the court has no jurisidction to territory disputes. This is the reason they rudely declare islands / shoal / reef in SCS all are not islands. In order to make this case applicable to their jurisdiction, they have break the basic fact, we can call it a scandal, and the rulingis harming the UNCLOS authority.
The Philippines had carefully constructed their case so as not to include issues regarding specific territorial disputes such as boundary delimitation, etc that are indeed outside the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. It was filed so that the dispute is about the “intepretation” of the law and conventions of UNCLOS, things which the Tribunal do indeed have jurisdiction over. And the Tribunal had disagreed with China and accept that the case is not related to those specific disputes that are exempted from UNCLOS, so the Tribunal ruled that it indeed has jurisdiction over most of the matter. If China disagree, then its too bad, because China had already ratified UNCLOS which has a very specific clause saying that even if there are disagreements regarding the Tribunal having jurisdiction, it is still the Tribunal that gets to decide on it. Read article 288 under UNCLOS. This specific clause validates the Tribunal’s ruling and its jurisdiction...and it is a clause that China had agreed to when it first ratified UNCLOS. In other words, this Tribunal and its ruling is valid and legal under UNCLOS, the same UNCLOS that China voluntarily became signatory to and the same UNCLOS which China is still legally binded to.
If you don’t like it then you can lobby your government to pull China out of UNCLOS, but you cannot claim that the Tribunal or its ruling is illegal, because it is in fact valid and legal under the provisions of UNCLOS. But I totally understand that when one party recieve an unfavorable ruling from a court, even in a normal civilian court, the most common reaction from the said party is to say that the court or ruling is biased or unfair. That’s a common reaction.