THE Philippines should now muster the support of the international community in changing the mind-set of the Chinese people over their “ownership” of the South China Sea before their government would comply with the recent arbitration ruling in the Philippines’s favor, the architect of the Manila’s arbitration case said.

Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio said Beijing is not expected to comply in the generations to come with the ruling of the United Nations’s Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which invalidated China’s nine-dash line as its basis for claiming sovereignty over the South China Sea.

He said the ruling is only the first step toward a thousand-mile journey in this “intergenerational struggle,” which the Philippines must wage to enforce its economic rights over a portion of the South China Sea that Manila calls the West Philippine Sea.

“All of the Chinese officials, generals, diplomats and members of the politburo—they all grew up being taught that they own the South China Sea,” Carpio said in an exclusive event covered by the BusinessMirror.

“How do you change that mind-set? We intended to do that first by securing the ruling. With this ruling, we will ask the entire world community to help us explain to the Chinese people that the nine-dash line has no basis in history and international law,” Carpio added.
Carpio recounted how the legal strategy of gaining back Philippine territory encroached upon by China was conceived.

He said in 1995 the Chinese navy physically took over Mischief Reef, and the Philippines could do nothing about it since it did not have the military strength to resist, and China had not yet ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos).

But with China’s ratification of the Unclos in 1996, the Philippines had a legal remedy to take back Mischief Reef and the rest of the South China Sea. And so, the legal strategy and the research to back up that strategy was conceived and an arbitration case was prepared. But no Philippine president gave the go-signal for the filing of the arbitration case until former President Benigno S. Aquino III allowed it to be filed with the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

Carpio said with the ruling on the arbitration case, the Philippines’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) had increased to 381,000 square kilometers, or more than the total land area of the Philippine archipelago.

http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/2016/08/13/sea-ruling-just-first-step-in-struggle-to-last-for-generations/