China said Tuesday it neither accepts nor recognizes the award of an arbitral tribunal in the South China Sea arbitration established at the request of the Philippines.
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Tribunal members also ruled that numerous islands in the Spratly chain could not be technically deemed islands, since the court ruled numerous land masses cannot sustain a “human community or independent economic life”, according to the ruling.
Vietnam, meanwhile Tuesday, accused Chinese vessels of sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat in disputed waters. The five fishermen were rescued by a trawler some seven hours later.
He said they can say to China: “Look, here are the results of an worldwide organization that has found that your claims have zero historical basis”.
While the Philippines filed the case in 2013, Beijings claims over the SCS are also contested by Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and Indonesia as well.
President Xi Jinping said China will never compromise on sovereignty and warned it was “not afraid of trouble”.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands, on Tuesday ruled that China has no “historic title” over the waters of the South China Sea.
China’s Defense Ministry put out a bilingual Chinese and English statement just before the ruling was made public, saying that the armed forces would “firmly safeguard national sovereignty, security and maritime interests and rights, firmly uphold regional peace and stability, and deal with all kinds of threats and challenges”.
Alternatively, Beijing could still go on the offensive; take more territory and become more aggressive in the South China Sea, to show that it will not succumb to global pressure. “China will not admit or accept the result of this arbitration”.
The Philippines had asked the tribunal to declare China’s claims and actions invalid under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Now that there’s a decision, the court has no way to enforce it.
“China claimed that its fishermen have been fishing in those waters for centuries, and therefore those waters and islands and resources belong to China”, Anthony says.
“We support efforts to resolve territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea peacefully, including through arbitration”, he said. Hague also finds that Chinese actions have aggravated Philippines dispute during resolution attempts. “When China kicked the Filipinos out of Scarborough Shoal in 2012, that was the last straw”.
Philippine Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay called it a “milestone decision”.
China holds that it has sovereign control over the Spratly and Paracels and its sovereign waters should be calculated from the coast of these “islands”, not from the coast of mainland China.
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China immediately rejected the ruling, labeling it “illegal” and arguing that the tribunal has no jurisdiction in the case.
