Distinguished colleagues in government, fellow servants of the Republic, friends, good morning.
Ten years ago this month, an arbitral tribunal constituted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea handed down its Award in the case our Republic brought against the People's Republic of China.
The other speakers today will speak of that day as a legal victory, which it was.
They will reflect on the award’s contributions to international law, as indeed the award gave much.
They will consider its promise for the peaceful settlement of disputes, and no one may deny that that promise is real.
I have been asked to speak of something quieter, and I believe, more durable.
I am asked to speak not of what we won by the Award, but of what it protects, every day, for ten years now, and why that protection will endure.
I speak from a particular vantage point.
The Office of the Solicitor General stood as Agent of the Republic in that arbitration.
When the case began, on the twenty-second of January 2013, the Solicitor General stood beside the Secretary of Foreign Affairs as the Notification and Statement of Claim was announced to the world.
Our duty was to protect our client, the Republic of the Philippines.
The heart of my message can be captured in two sentences:
The promulgation of a judgment is an event; but a legal protection ought not to be a singular moment, but consistent practice. The South China Sea Award endures to this day not because it was rendered in The Hague, but because
the Republic decided, in our Constitution, in our laws, in our institutions, and outwards in our dealing with the world, to live by it.
Let me first recall how difficult the road to The Hague was, because the difficulty makes clear the reach of the award’s protection.
The road leads us back to 2009 when China formally asserted its claim to a nine-dash line. The line was contained in a map which was attached to its objection to the joint filing of Vietnam and Malaysia on the outer limits of their continental shelves under the Convention.
The map covered nearly all of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the Philippines and its neighboring states in the South China Sea. Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines protested China’s map for being contrary to the UNCLOS, among others.
Less than three (3) years later, in April 2012, Chinese and Philippine vessels stood off at Bajo de Masinloc, the Scarborough Shoal. Scarborough Shoal lies some 124 nautical miles from the coast of Zambales. It always been known as Philippine territory where our fishermen regularly fished. It was what our forefathers knew, it was what our children knew.
In 2012, Chinese law enforcement vessels began preventing Philippine vessels from gaining access to the shoal. These vessels dangerously approached Philippine ships twice, creating a serious risk of accidents, thereby violating the basic maritime rules that keep sailors safe at sea.
The stand-off in fact lasted for months. When it ended, our fishermen could no longer fish where their grandfathers had fished.
The pressure was not only at sea. That same year, Philippine banana shipments met sudden barriers at Chinese ports,1 and Filipino tour groups were cancelled.2
Filing the case was not an obvious choice. No claimant State had ever brought these disputes to international litigation. And the legal path was deliberately narrow. But we needed clarity on rights over the waters surrounding the archipelago, particularly those in the South China Sea. No less than the livelihood of our fishing communities was at stake. The case was borne by the most basic needs of our People.
In August 2006, China had filed a declaration under Article 298 of the Convention, opting out of compulsory settlement for disputes over maritime boundary delimitation and over historic bays or titles.
So the Republic's lawyers had to thread a needle. We could not ask who owns the islands. Questions on sovereignty lie beyond the Convention.
We could not ask where a boundary runs. By its declaration, China had excluded settlement of issues on delimitation.
What we could ask was what the sea itself allows: whether a line of nine dashes can create entitlements the Convention does not recognize; whether certain features are islands, rocks, or low-tide elevations as to give rise to rights over the surrounding seas; and whether China’s conduct within our exclusive economic zone was lawful.
On 22 January 2013, the Philippines filed on precisely those questions.
As the Department of Foreign Affairs said that very day, our filing deliberately avoided every claim that China's declaration had placed beyond reach.3
China chose not to appear. That made our task harder, not easier.
Under Annex VII, when a party is absent, the tribunal must still satisfy itself that it has jurisdiction and that every claim is well founded in fact and in law.
The Tribunal upheld its jurisdiction in October 2015 and ruled on the merits on the twelfth of July 2016.
But while our case was being reviewed, China intensified the construction of a large artificial island on Mischief Reef – a low-tide elevation inside our exclusive economic zone.
The Tribunal later found that this caused severe, irreparable harm to the coral reef ecosystem at seven reefs; that it permanently destroyed evidence of their natural condition; and that it aggravated the very dispute brought to The Hague. China told the world these works were civilian. That statement is the reason the Tribunal had jurisdiction to condemn them.
The Philippines did not come to the Convention as a stranger. We signed it at Montego Bay in December 1982 and ratified it in 1984. We are among the earliest nations to do so, the 11th to be exact.4
And in the long negotiations before that, Filipino diplomats, together with Indonesia and other island nations, helped write the very concept of the archipelagic State into the law of the sea.
Now to the heart of the matter: what exactly does the Award protect, and how?
Our attempt to answer this question must begin not in The Hague in 2016 but in Manila in 1987, with the Constitution.
Article XII, Section 2 commands: “The State shall protect the nation's marine wealth in its archipelagic waters, territorial sea, and exclusive economic zone, and reserve its use and enjoyment exclusively to Filipino citizens.”
I ask that we focus on the verb: shall.
The protection of our marine patrimony is not a policy that administrations may take up or set down as they please. It is a standing constitutional duty, addressed to the State itself, which is to say, to every one of us in this room.
But a duty needs definiteness.
The reach of that duty was shadowed by a claim drawn in nine dashes across the sea. If that claim had stood, it would have swallowed most of our exclusive economic zone.
What the Award supplied was certainty. It confirmed that within our exclusive economic zone the Philippines holds sovereign rights. Not sovereignty over the waters, but the exclusive right, ours and no one else's, to explore, exploit, conserve, and manage the resources of the sea, the seabed, and its subsoil.
The Award drew no boundary; it expressly declined to. What it did was lift the cloud: it held that the nine-dash line generates no entitlement to resources, and that no feature China claims in the Spratlys generates an exclusive economic zone of its own. Our zone stands, unshadowed.
What does that mean in daily life? It means the fish that feed our coastal towns are, in law, Filipino fish. It means the gas beneath Recto Bank is, in law, Filipino gas. And that Bajo de Masinloc, in law, remains a traditional fishing ground from which our fishermen may not lawfully be barred.
When we speak of enduring protection, we should see faces: the fisherman, the coastal family, the child whose food security was litigated in The Hague without her ever knowing it.
Before the Award in 2016, the Philippines successfully asserted in 2012 its entitlement to the Benham Rise Region as part of its extended continental shelf, an area bigger than the whole island of Luzon.
This entitlement, and the Award in 2016, reignited the maritime legislative reforms already began in 2009 when the Philippine Archipelagic Baselines Act which sought alignment of Philippine baselines with UNCLOS was passed. Both animated the codification of Philippine laws that align with the Convention.
In November 2024, Congress enacted, and the President signed, R.A. No. 12064, the Philippine Maritime Zones Act, and R.A. No. 12065, the Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act.
The Maritime Zones Act writes into our statute books the extent of our maritime zones, standing squarely on the Constitution and on the Convention.
The Executive has described these twin laws, and rightfully so, as operationalizing the 2016 Award.
Beyond the Award, therefore, what we see is a country that is steadfastly building its maritime rights by upholding the rule of law.
Earlier this year, Executive Order No. 111 went further still.
Through this EO, the President directed our mapping authorities to publish charts bearing Philippine names for the features of the Kalayaan Island Group and reflecting the Maritime Zones Act.
I invite you to trace the arc with me.
A constitutional command of 1987. The legal certainty of 2016. The statute books of 2024. The 2026 directive to publish the charts.
That is what enduring protection looks like in a Republic of laws: an international award woven, thread by thread, into domestic legal obligation. Paper into law; law into practice.
But statutes and awards do not patrol the sea. Protection presupposes an enforcing Republic, and I am looking at this room full of the people who do the enforcing.
This has not always been the case. But since 2022, the Philippines has taken bolder steps in advancing the Award and its protections.
The Coast Guard has made a practice of publishing what happens at sea. Every event is recorded; every record is potential evidence.
We have now chosen to let the world see what has been happening, and by all indications, the world now pays closer attention.
Then, in March 2024, Executive Order No. 57 reorganized the National Coast Watch Council into the National Maritime Council.
The National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea sits attached to that Council.
The Solicitor General is a member of the Council. From that seat, I can tell you what enduring protection looks like on an ordinary Tuesday.
It is the Coast Guard holding station in our waters with discipline under intense provocation: whether it be the use of water cannons, aggressive maneuvers, or confrontations at Ayungin Shoal and Bajo de Masinloc.
It is BFAR standing beside our fisherfolk under the gaze of the Chinese maritime militia.
It is NAMRIA drawing the charts.
It is the Department of Foreign Affairs filing the protests, patiently, one by one.
It is the Armed Forces sustaining a presence that gives the law not merely a witness but teeth.
None of that is the Office of the Solicitor General's work, and I claim none of it.
Our part is quieter.
We are not the ships; we are the legal shield. The Office exists so that every action the Republic takes at sea can be defended in every forum in which it may ever be tested, so that our conduct is always the conduct of a State that knows its rights and stays within them.
There is a wider circle of protection I want to name before I close, because the Award protects more than Philippine entitlements. It protects the character of the sea itself and, with it, interests far larger than our own.
Consider what passes through the South China Sea.
By UNCTAD and CSIS estimates, roughly a fifth of global trade, or around three trillion dollars a year, and about a third of the world's shipping transit these waters.5
For an archipelago like ours, the stakes are existential: we import and export by sea. The energy that lights this room, the goods in our markets, the exports on which millions of Filipino livelihoods depend — these move along
these lanes. And what is true for us is true for our neighbours, and likely for every trading nation on earth.
Now recall what the nine-dash claim was, at bottom: a claim to enclose nearly an entire semi-enclosed sea.
By holding that maritime entitlements can arise only from the Convention, the Award kept the South China Sea what the law says it must be, a sea governed by rules, in which navigation and overflight, commerce and cables, fishing and science each have their lawful place.
That certainty is a security good in the strictest sense. Instability at sea is priced into every insurance premium, every rerouted voyage, every delayed cargo.
Law remains the least expensive security architecture ever devised, and the Award is load-bearing law.
And here is the part I say with quiet pride: the Philippines asks of the law only what it gives.
The same Congress that fixed our maritime zones in 2024 also passed the Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act, designating the routes through which foreign ships and aircraft may pass through our archipelago, in the manner the Convention provides.
We claimed our rights and, in the same breath, honored everyone else's.
That is the conduct of a State that believes in the system it invoked, the same State that helped write the archipelagic regime in 1982, that ratified early in 1984, that filed its case carefully in 2013, and that codifies that law faithfully today.
National security. Regional stability. Freedom of navigation. The flow of commerce. These are not subjects separate from the Award. They are what the Award, kept alive, quietly underwrites — for us, for our nation and for the region, for generations to come.
Administrations change. Emphases shift. Budgets rise and fall. The Republic, however, is a continuing client, and this decade's work has moved the Award's protection beyond the reach of any single season of politics.
The Award lives now in the Constitution's standing command. In two statutes of the land. In standing institutions that meet whether or not the news is watching. In charts our children will study, bearing our own names for our own features.
The Office of the Solicitor General is the law firm of the Republic, and its lawyers, tribunes of the people.
The instruction is clear and unmistakable: protect the nation's marine wealth for Filipinos, and for the Filipinos yet to come.
An award is paper until a Republic chooses to live by it.
For ten years, through every test, the Filipino has chosen to live by the Award.
The award’s protection endures because the choosing continues — in the Council, in this Department, in this room, in every statute and every chart, in every protest patiently filed, and in every fisher who puts out to sea because our Constitution says it is national patrimony, and because the law of nations says he may.
Maraming salamat, at mabuhay po tayong lahat.
