Experts say that the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague, the Netherlands, has no jurisdiction over South China Sea disputes between China and the Philippines, which unilaterally filed an arbitration case.
The Philippines' move went against an agreement it reached with China in the mid-1990s on settling their disputes through negotiation.
China has excluded maritime delimitation from compulsory arbitration in a declaration it made in 2006 in accordance with Article 298 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and has made it clear it will not accept or get involved in those proceedings.
The experts voiced their viewpoints, saying the tribunal has abused its mandate granted by the UNCLOS by involving itself in a territorial dispute, as territorial issues are beyond the scope of the convention.
Antonios Tzanakopoulos, associate professor of public international law at the University of Oxford
-- For the most part, the tribunal hasn't answered satisfactorily with respect to why there is a dispute under UNCLOS, and also how these claims do not relate to sovereignty, and in my view they do (relate to sovereignty).
Chris Whomersley, former deputy legal adviser to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
-- Questions of territorial sovereignty, status of features and maritime delimitation are inextricably linked; to consider only one element out of these three is unreal and artificial, and worse it risks producing a distorted result.
Peter Li, associate professor of the University of Houston Downtown
-- The tribunal has abused its mandate granted by the UNCLOS by involving itself in a territorial dispute that it has no authority to rule over.
Greg Austin, professor at University of New South Wales Canberra
-- While the Philippines is quite within its rights to use UNCLOS, that will not answer any questions of territorial sovereignty and the Permanent Court will make no judgment and can make no judgment on territorial sovereignty.
Yasser Gadallah, director of the Chinese-Egyptian Research Center at Helwan University
-- Arbitration requires the consent of the two concerned parties that resort together to an international arbitration committee whose decisions are binding for both of them.
Mahmoud Allam, former Egyptian ambassador to China
-- The arbitration is apparently unlawful with China being absent. This is common sense in international law.
China maintains that the tribunal handling of the arbitration proceedings has no jurisdiction over the case, which is in essence about territorial sovereignty and maritime delimitation.
