Kerry is the highest-ranking United States official to visit the Philippines since Duterte’s election victory in May and follows a meeting of foreign ministers from Southeast Asian nations in Laos this week.
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In the context of Asean-China relations, Retno said that foreign ministers from Asean member countries and China have also released a joint statement agreeing on the implementation of the Declaration of Conduct in solving the South China Sea dispute.
Competing claims with China in the vital shipping lane and resource-rich sea are among the most contentious issues for the 10 members of ASEAN, who are pulled between their desire to assert their sovereignty while fostering ties with an increasingly assertive Beijing.
China’s reclamation work in the region has prompted the USA and its allies to express alarm over the maritime expansion, which they suspect is aimed at extending its military reach.
Most significantly, it failed to mention a recent ruling by an global arbitration panel in a dispute between the Philippines and China that said Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea were illegal and that the Philippines was justifiably the aggrieved party. China, however, does not accept the tribunal’s authority over the matter and has rejected the ruling.
Philippines’ Foreign Minister Perfecto Yasay said yesterday that Manila had “vigorously pushed” for the inclusion of a comment on the arbitration ruling in the Asean statement this week but did not want to press the issue and risk dividing the group or provoke China.
But Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said a joint communique about the situation in the South China Sea, which was published at the same time as the statement with China, portrayed unity within the region.
The South China Sea is a highly-contested region through which almost $5 trillion in global trade passes annually.
Barack Obama is set to become the first USA president to visit Laos, attending an annual summit in September.
Lajcak said the European Union welcomed the consensus reached between China and the ASEAN members on full and effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC).
He also expressed hopes that former Philippine President, Fidel Valdez Ramos, who has been appointed as a special envoy to China by President Rodrigo Duterte, will make a visit to China as soon as possible. “We would like to pursue bilateral relationships in so far as the peaceful resolution of the dispute is concerned that is between the China and the Philippines”, Yasay told reporters.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Laos’ capital on Monday.
“I would encourage President Duterte to engage in dialogue, in negotiations”.
“The decision itself is a binding decision but we’re not trying to create a confrontation”.
The joint communique issued at the 49th Asean Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Vientiane on Sunday reaffirmed the countries’ commitment to maintaining peace and respecting legal and diplomatic processes based on the principles of global law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
“What we are pushing for is absolute support for rule of law, for the legal process, and for diplomacy to work out the differences that people have”.
Bonnie Glaser, Director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and Internatonal Studies (CSIS), told VOA that Washington “has not excluded other forms of negotiations and has stressed that multilateral mechanisms should be employed as well, especially when bilateral talks prove fruitless”.
In the wake of the tribunal ruling, fears of militarization in the area grew as China announced long-range bomber flights to distant islands and new naval drills, while the United States said it would continue sailing and flying through the region.
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The meeting also tackled climate change days after Duterte said the Philippines was reviewing its “crazy” commitment to severely cut greenhouse-gas emissions under the Paris climate deal.
