Ten years after: What the Philippines really won

Ten years after the Philippines won its landmark arbitration against China in the South China Sea (SCS), the decision is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest legal victories in our history. We commemorate the invalidation of the nine-dash line, the recognition of our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and continental shelf (CS), and the affirmation of our sovereign rights over the resources within these regimes.

Yet a decade later, we still misunderstand what, exactly, the Philippines won.

The 2016 arbitral tribunal told us what rights the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) gave the Philippines. It did not fully explain why those rights deserved such extraordinary protection under international law. To appreciate the deeper significance of the decision, we must go back not to The Hague but to the negotiations that produced the Unclos.

The conventional story portrays Unclos as a technical treaty allocating maritime zones among states. The historical record tells a richer story. Much of modern law of the sea was shaped by newly independent countries determined to complete the unfinished work of decolonization.

It is one of history’s great ironies that the legal architecture behind the Philippines’ victory was built largely by developing countries themselves, including the Philippines, Indonesia, and even China.

The Philippines, together with Indonesia, transformed the law of the sea through the concept of the archipelagic state. Manila’s original proposal was even more ambitious than the regime eventually adopted by Unclos.

The convention ultimately struck a compromise, but it nevertheless accepted the revolutionary proposition that an archipelago could constitute a single juridical unit rather than a mere collection of scattered islands. That innovation proved decisive in the SCS arbitration. The tribunal rejected China’s attempt to treat the Spratlys as an offshore archipelago capable of generating collective maritime zones, since the area appreciably departs from China’s mainland.

Instead, it held that at best, the area only features low-tide elevations not susceptible to appropriation by anyone and rocks that only generate a territorial sea. That ruling also applies to all other claimant states.

China, for its part, helped construct another pillar of the convention. During the Unclos negotiations, it consistently argued, alongside other developing countries, that coastal states should enjoy exclusive rights over marine resources because those resources were indispensable to national development and economic independence. Indonesia gave that aspiration its clearest legal expression.

Political freedom without control over natural wealth—including those found in the seas—would remain largely symbolic.

This is where the SCS arbitration stopped one important step short. The tribunal faithfully applied Unclos and correctly upheld the Philippines’ sovereign rights over the resources of its EEZ and CS. But it did not pursue the logical doctrinal implications of the convention’s own postcolonial foundations.

Had it done so, it would have recognized that the Philippines’ maritime entitlements are not merely treaty allocations negotiated among consenting states. They derive from Unclos precisely because the treaty embodies the postcolonial transformation of international law through which the rights to self-determination (RSD) was translated into concrete maritime entitlements.

The Philippines’ EEZ and continental shelf are not simply creations of treaty text. They are the juridical forms—erga omnes obligations—through which one of the central achievements of decolonization was written into the law of the sea itself. China’s continuing resistance to the award is often discussed as a refusal to comply with a binding arbitral decision. Yet it is something more.

If the Philippines’ maritime entitlements represent the law’s recognition that political independence includes permanent sovereignty over marine resources, then resistance is directed not merely against one tribunal or one treaty. It challenges a legal settlement painstakingly forged by the very developing countries that reshaped international law at decolonization.

The irony is impossible to miss. The legal principles that defeated China’s historic-rights claim were principles that China itself once championed.

Ten years after the award, the Philippines should therefore tell a fuller story about its victory. It was not merely a triumph of legal interpretation over geopolitical power. It represented the success of a postcolonial legal project in which Asian States themselves—including the Philippines, Indonesia, and yes, China—were among the principal architects. And such triumph does not pertain merely to treaty-based rights. As maritime expressions of the RSD through permanent sovereignty over natural resources, they are opposable to all states.

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Romel Regalado Bagares teaches international law at three Philippine law schools and the Philippine Judicial Academy.