The Philippines should seek UN help on WPS ruling — ex-DFA chief

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines should seek the help of the United Nations in enforcing a 2016 arbitral ruling on the territorial dispute in the West Philippine Sea, former foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario said yesterday.

“We need to prepare a strategy for taking our case to the UN. It will take time and hard work, but we must do this for the sake of our many generations to come,” he said.

He said the ruling that favored the country “is now an integral part of international law.”

“This should have been the setting between the two presidents (President Duterte and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping) in Beijing. For the Philippines to have been asked to agree that it will not bring up the issue again is to effectively accept without equivocation that China is above the rule of law,” he added.

“This would be so wrong. It would be a betrayal of the trust we have placed in our governance. We must convince our leadership that we need to strengthen our resolve, and not have it weakened,” he stressed.

Del Rosario and Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio were part of the Philippine team that won the favorable ruling, which invalidated China’s claims over most of the South China Sea.

In a related development, Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte commended the President “for making strides in his latest trip to China toward the eventual peaceful and productive resolution of tensions related to the conflicting claims of Manila and Beijing over waters that we now call the West Philippine Sea.”

“The President has been bold and forthright enough to assert the Philippines’ legal victory over China in the arbitral case before the PCA (Permanent Court of Arbitration) in The Hague in 2016,” Villafuerte, a deputy speaker in the House of Representatives, said.

He said even if the Philippine and Chinese leaders “ended up insisting on their country’s respective maritime claims, they agreed to continue with peaceful dialogues on that issue.”

He noted statements by presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo that the dispute “should not be the sum total of the relationship between the two countries.”

The President likewise raised the possibility of joint exploration in Philippine waters, to which Xi said a steering committee created for that purpose should work on a substantive program on the issue.