Antonio Carpio insists protests vs China incursions must continue

MANILA, Philippines — Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio has renewed his call for the Duterte administration to file new protests against China for its incursions in waters within Philippine territory.

“I hope they will continue to file protests so that we will be able to show that we never consented impliedly (to Chinese incursions in West Philippine Sea),” Carpio stressed in an interview.

“If you don’t protest, you accept. You give up your rights and we don’t want to do that,” the Supreme Court magistrate said.

Carpio argued that filing of protests against China is necessary to protect the sovereignty of the Philippines over its exclusive economic zones in the West Philippine Sea that Chinese ships have already reportedly penetrated. 

“We won in the (arbitration court 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,” he explained.

Still, Carpio reiterated his support for the memorandum of understanding signed during the state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping in the country last month for possible joint oil and gas development in the West Philippine Sea.

He commended the Duterte administration for not accepting the draft MOU presented by China and instead pursued 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. Should China accept to be a service contractor, then China admits that we have exclusive sovereign rights. That’s the most important thing here,” he pointed out, referring to the Malampaya gas field in Palawan.

However, he reiterated that joint exploration and exploitation with China cannot be allowed as it is prohibited by the 1987 Constitution as it would be tantamount to surrendering part of the country’s sovereignty over its territory.

“We want to use ‘cooperation’ in oil and gas through service contracts because it could be confusing to use the word joint again. Joint exploration is prohibited by our Constitution. We should call it cooperation through service contracts,” he added.