Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio on Tuesday urged the Duterte administration to file new protests against China over its incursions in the West Philippine Sea.
“‹He said the Philippines should file diplomatic protests against China but backed the memorandum of understanding between the two governments for a possible joint oil and gas development in the West Philippine Sea.
“I hope they will continue to file protests so that we will be able to show that we never consented impliedly [to the Chinese incursions in West Philippine Sea],” Carpio said.
“If you don’t protest, you accept. You give up your rights and we don’t wanna do that.”
Carpio said the filing of protests against China was necessary to protect the sovereignty of the Philippines over its exclusive economic zones in the West Philippine Sea that Chinese ships had already reportedly penetrated.
“We won in The Hague because we filed several, numerous protests, note verbales protesting China’s incursion in the West Philippine Sea. Had we not made those protests against China’s nine-dash line map on time, we would have lost,” Carpio said.
Nonetheless, Carpio reiterated his support to the MOU signed during the state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping last month.
He commended the Duterte administration for not accepting the draft MOU presented by China and instead pursuing its own version of the MOU, which included the safety provision on service contracting.
Carpio said such provision would “expressly acknowledge that the natural resource belongs to the Philippines” and that “the Philippines has exclusive sovereign rights over the gas and oil.”
“On our terms, it means cooperation on oil and gas through service contracts. And there’s no problem about that because in Malampaya, we have a service contractor, which is a foreign company,” Carpio said.
“Should China accept to be a service contractor, then China admits that we have exclusive sovereign rights. That’s the most important thing here.”