Malacañang supports the decision of the government to remove parts of the Australian drama series "Pine Gap" on its platform for "violating Philippine sovereignty" and featuring a map of the nine-dash line, an invisible demarcation used by China to refer to its claim in the South China Sea.
Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said the Palace supported the order of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) to Netflix to cut out episodes of “Pine Gap” for “violating Philippine sovereignty.”
The Palace supports it because MTRCB is under the Office of the President and the Department of Foreign Affairs itself was the one that asked MTRCB to have it taken down in the country, he said.
The DFA lodged a complaint before the MTRCB, which handed down its decision dated Sept. 28, 2021 to pull out the said episodes "for showing a map of China’s nine-dash line and violating Philippine sovereignty."
The DFA said the Board had ruled that certain episodes of “Pine Gap” were “unfit for public exhibition.”
In its decision, the MTRCB noted that “under a whole-of-nation approach, every instrumentality of the government, whenever presented with the opportunity, had the responsibility to counter China’s aggressive actions in the West Philippine Sea to assert thePhilippines’ territorial integrity."
It stressed the portrayal of "the illegal nine-dash line in Pine Gap is no accident as it was consciously designed and calculated to specifically convey a message that China’s nine-dash line legitimately exists."
It added such portrayal was a "crafty attempt to perpetuate and memorialize in the consciousness of the present generation of viewers and the generations to come the illegal nine-dash line."
"Using the medium of a motion picture is but China’s unconventional approach to gain an upper hand in the territorial conflict in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea,” the MTRCB said. (See full story online at manilastandard.net)
The Philippines earlier protested the showing in Netflix of two episodes of an Australian political drama, which depicts China’s illegal claims in the South China Sea, part of which includes the West Philippine Sea that the United Nations-backed Permanent Court of
Arbitration had upheld as part of Manila’s exclusive economic zone in
its July 2016 arbitral ruling.
The complaint filed by the Department of Foreign Affairs has prompted Netflix to pull out two episodes of Australian political drama “Pine Gap” for its depiction of China's illegal claims in the disputed South China Sea through its so-called “nine-dash line” claims.
The UN-backed Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in favor of the Philippines in 2016 invalidating China’s massive nine-dash line claims over the South China Sea and upheld Manila’s exclusive economic zone in the West Philippine Sea.
Although China continues to ignore the arbitral award, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and six other countries have publicly called for the ruling to be respected.
As of Tuesday morning, two episodes of Pine Gap were no longer available in the Philippines.
In its video streaming platform, Netflix indicated that the episodes had been "removed by government demand."
The DFA stressed out that the Australian show's portrayal of China's illegal nine-dash line was "no accident as it was consciously designed and calculated to specifically convey a message that China's nine-dash line legitimately exists."
"Such portrayal is a crafty attempt to perpetuate and memorialize in the consciousness of the present generation of viewers and the generations to come the illegal nine-dash line," the DFA said, citing the MTRCB decision.
The MTRCB also called out China's "unconventional approach" to gain an upper hand in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea issue using such a medium.
Earlier this year, Netflix also removed the entire series in Vietnam over the same issue. Reports showed that Hanoi's Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information said the violations of Netflix "angered and hurt the feelings of the entire people of Vietnam."