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As expected, China protested the enactment of our Maritime Zones Act (Republic Act No. 12064) that defines our maritime boundaries, including our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and continental shelf (CS), and its twin law, our Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act (RA 12065) that designates the sea lanes and air routes that foreign military and foreign-registered civilian aircraft and vessels can use within the maritime zones identified by the first law. The simple reason: China claims historical sovereignty and rights over these same zones.
NEITHER SHOULD CHINA BE SURPRISED by their enactment for they merely preserve and buttress our sovereign rights over these zones as spelled out by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) and the Arbitral Award handed down on July 12, 2016, under the auspices of The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration as registrar.
These two complimentary laws also clarify and solidify the definition of our “National Territory” under Article I of our Constitution particularly those “other territories over which the Philippines has sovereignty or jurisdiction, consisting of its terrestrial, fluvial, and aerial domains, including its territorial sea, the seabed, the subsoil, the insular shelves, and other submarine areas.”
By enacting these two laws, the Philippines has, as a consequence, limited its maritime (and territorial) boundaries defined under (1) the 1898 Treaty of Paris between the United States and Spain; (2) the 1900 Treaty also between the US and Spain, and (3) the controversial 1930 Treaty between the US and the United Kingdom apparently delimiting the boundary between the Philippines and “North Borneo.”
BY ITS ADHERENCE TO UNCLOS and its enactment of these two statutes, our country has voluntarily ceded some maritime claims that are defined in the three treaties.
