By Javad Heydarian
With the standoff over the Scarborough Shoal (“Huangyan Island” to the Chinese and “Panatag Shoal” to the Filipinos) having entered its second month, many are wondering how long the tiny Philippines will stand its ground as Beijing steps up its diplomatic and military pressure.
If this were simply a legal matter, the deck would surely be heavily stacked against the Chinese. The shoal is located clearly within the country’s 200-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland.
International law also favors the Philippines on another level. Following the Island of Palmas Case as an international legal precedence, Manila’s “actual, effective, and continuous” exercise of control and sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal gives it the upper hand in any third party international legal arbitration. In fact, in 2010, the northern town of Masinloc (200 kilometers away) claimed the shoal as part of its municipality.
Just recently, in accordance with the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, Manila was able to secure its claim over the Benham Rise – a maritime region located within Manila’s EEZ to its east in the Pacific Ocean. No wonder, a confident Manila has sought to take the Scarborough dispute to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
However, territorial disputes are fundamentally about how disputing parties employ all elements of their national power to secure their interest – and this is precisely where the Philippines is heavily outmatched, outspent, and outgunned.
Read the full story at The Diplomat