Beaten to the draw again

COMMONSENSE

- MARICHU A. VILLANUEVA

Being assailed for not toeing the line on the "rules-based international order" in the South China Sea (SCS) maritime territorial dispute with other claimant countries like the Philippines, China beat us in complying with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Both the Philippines and China are signatories to the UNCLOS.

As it turned out, China submitted to the UNCLOS ahead of the Philippines to officially lay claim to Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal, located at Bajo de Masinloc, just off our own Zambales province in the West Philippine Sea (WPS). China quietly submitted last month to the United Nations (UN) Secretary General its own crafted chart of baselines of territorial sea.

Per China's version of their maritime territories, their baselines map encompassed all the way to what they named as Ren'ai Jiao to Xianbin Jiao and from Houteng Jiao to Huangyan Dao.

But it was only last Tuesday that Ambassador Antonio Lagdameo, Permanent Representative of the Philippines to the UN in New York, contested China's submission to the UNCLOS. "Bajo de Masinloc has always been an integral part of the territory of the Philippines. Only the Philippines, in the exercise of its sovereignty, has the right to establish baselines, and the breadth of the territorial sea around Bajo de Masinloc, in line with the UNCLOS," Lagdameo declared before the UN General Assembly.

Just a few years back, we lost to China's initiatives some of the underwater features in the Benham Rise, which was recently renamed as the Philippine Rise. At least five of these features now bear Chinese names by virtue of China's application before the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and its subsequent approval in 2017.