Acting Chief Justice Antonio T. Carpio has long been vocal in his opposition to the Duterte administration’s inaction on the 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague rejecting China’s claim to virtually all of the South China Sea and upholding the Philippines’ right to reefs, shoals, and banks within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines.
On the recent oil exploration agreement between China and the Philippines, however, Justice Carpio came out last Sunday in support of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed during the recent state visit of China President Xi Jinping.
The MOU calls for the setting up of a Joint Steering Committee and Working Group to be led by the two countries’ ministries of foreign affairs and energy. The MOU provides: “This Memorandum of Understanding does not create rights or obligations under international or domestic law.”
“I think we’re pretty safe,” Chief Justice Carpio said. The MOU “has safeguards to protect our sovereignty,” he said.
Carpio was a member of the Philippine Arbitration Team that argued the Philippine position at the Permanent Court Arbitration which handed down its ruling in 2016 that rejected China’s claim to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea and upheld the Philippine claim to Mischief Reef, Second Thomas shoal, and Reed Bank as part of the Philippines 370-kilometer EEZ and continental shelf. This was in the last year of the Aq
uino administration.
When President Duterte began his administration, he declared that while the Philippines stands by the PCA ruling, it would opt, in the meantime, for closer economic ties and cooperation with China in the face of that nation’s insistence on its claim of sovereignty.
The Philippines in 2016 was ready to begin oil exploration in the Reed Bank, a wide area west of Palawan with promising signs of oil and gas reserves, but in the face of China’s unswerving stand, it suspended all exploration plans. Now, two years later, with the MOU signed during President Xi’s recent state visit, exploration of the Reed Bank will finally proceed as a joint China-PH project.
And it will proceed without fears that we may yielding any legal or sovereign rights, because of the provisions in the MOU that our Department of Foreign Affairs, headed by its new Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr., ensured would be included in the MOU signed last week.
We look forward to substantial economic benefits arising from the exploration agreement, and we welcome the assurance, voiced by Chief Justice Carpio, that it has safeguards to protect our nation’s sovereignty.