GRONINGEN, The Netherlands, June 14 (Xinhua) -- The arbitral tribunal in the Philippines' South China Sea (SCS) arbitration exceeded its competence by circumventing the real disputes and by degrading the role of States, such arbitral expansion is detrimental to the settlement of disputes, said Haibo Gou, legal advisor and counsellor at the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands.
The Philippines, which illegally occupied some of China's islands and reefs in the SCS in the 1970s, unilaterally filed the arbitration in 2013.
The Philippines raised 15 submissions, on China's U shaped line, on the entitlements of several maritime features, and on the legality of China's activities in the SCS.
The Philippines asserted that these submissions are irrelevant to the territorial and delimitation disputes. And the arbitral tribunal endorsed such assertion with a ruling in October 2015.
Using a graph indicating the relationship between relevant dispute settlement process and the Philippines' submissions, Gou remarked that the settlement of territorial and delimitation disputes is an integral process.
"Territorial dispute needs to be addressed first, to be followed by the settlement of delimitation dispute. Only with the territory and delimitation disputes settled, could the question of legality of activities in disputed area be answered. The Philippines' submissions are either part of or dependent on the territorial and delimitation disputes,"he said at a lecture at Groningen University on Monday.
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