Make sovereignty over West Philippine Sea a 2022 elections issue —Carpio

Retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio enjoined Monday the Filipino people to make the country's claim in the West Philippine Sea an important factor in choosing the next set of government officials to be elected in the 2022 national polls.

"We must make it an election issue this 2022. We must vote for a government that will assert and preserve our sovereign rights in the West Philippine Sea," Carpio said in a virtual forum.

Carpio pointed out that the Philippines has yet to file for an extended continental shelf claim in a part of Luzon facing the South China Sea but such cannot be done because of the administration's current relations with the Asian powerhouse.

Long-term plan

The former associate justice said the COVID-19 pandemic has just proved that China will not relent on its mission to seize marine territories which started in 1946.

"China will always take advantage of a crisis, even this pandemic crisis. While we are busy fighting COVID-19, China is furthering poaching on our waters and territories in the West Philippine Sea. That just goes to show that China has a long-term plan and will continue to implement this plan as time passes," Carpio said.

"China wants to make its nine-dash line its national boundary. We will lose a maritime area larger than our total land area if China succeeds in making the nine-dash line as China's national boundary," he added.

The Philippine government must step up to have its long-term plan in asserting the international tribunal's ruling which invalidated China's massive claims in the countries' waters, according to Carpio.

"This is a creeping expansion and they have a plan. We don't have a long-term plan to counter China. That is what's missing in our strategy," he said.

The role of education

Aside from forming a coalition with Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia which could do joint naval patrols at exclusive economic zones to deter China's aggressive behavior, education will play an important part.

"Future generations of Filipinos must continue the struggle to defend the West Philippine Sea. But will they? It depends on us. If the present generation, we, educate our youth that the sovereign rights in the West Philippine Sea belong to the Filipino people, then they will continue the struggle," Carpio said.

"I call this an inter-generational struggle. This will not be solved in our generation. This will be solved probably in succeeding generations of Filipinos," he added.

A good database of all arguments—historical, legal, and environmental research—must be compiled for easy access, Carpio said.

Journalist Marites Vitug, author of the book Rock Solid: How the Philippines Won Its Maritime Case against China, also shared the same vision.

"We were not really taught that we are a maritime country. I don't remember that we have a geography course in class that we have one of the longest coastlines in world, number five. In fact, we have more water than land," Vitug said.

She underscored that the inclusion of the issue in the country's education curriculum would be one concrete step in upholding the claim of the country in the West Philippine Sea.

"If there's a way that this could be part of the curriculum, if DepEd or CHED, they can include this, it will be very helpful for the young people because this can be a complicated issue," Vitug said.

The Philippines and China are both claimants of a portion of the South China Sea.

The Duterte administration, however, has chosen to strengthen the country's economic ties with China and not to impose the arbitral ruling in 2016 which invalidated the latter's massive claims in the disputed waters.—AOL, GMA News