SENATORS TO OPPOSE SANTIAGO PLAN TO KILL BASELINES BILL
MANILA, APRIL 27, 2008 (STAR) By Aurea Calica -Senator Edgardo Angara and Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. vowed yesterday to oppose the plan of Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago to kill the bills delineating the Philippines’ new baselines by proposing a commission to conduct a study on national territory first.“You should realize that one senator cannot be an assassin and kill a bill because five other senators can take it out of her hands, out of her committee. That is under our Senate rules,” Angara told The STAR.
Angara and Pimentel said they would push for an immediate debate on the baselines citing the urgency of the matter given the May 2009 deadline set by the United Nations to submit claims on the extended continental shelf under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Aside from Pimentel and Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, Angara said he had also filed a bill defining the country’s baselines under the UNCLOS and pressed that their proposed measures be tackled.
Santiago, who chairs the Senate committee on foreign relations, said one way of killing the bills would be to have the commission created and give these bills the lowest priority.
Santiago said there must be a scientific and scholarly study first before bills on national territory could be tackled because the UNCLOS “is in conflict with the Philippine Constitution.” “The study of the commission might take so much time and we cannot afford to delay action on this because it is our national territory that is at stake. We must be able to protect out territorial integrity and sovereignty,” Angara said.
Angara said it should not matter whether President Arroyo indeed ordered the junking of the bills, which prompted Santiago to shelve them and push for the commission on national territory.
He said Santiago could conduct the hearings on their bills even as another body would be formed to make a study on UNCLOS, the Constitution and other data needed to establish the country’s baselines.
“They can be done simultaneously. Her perceived defects of the bills can be corrected through the hearings. If she wants the study, it must be finished by the end of the session so after the (sine die adjournment in June), we can put the bills in our priority list when we go back in July. We should be working fast, we will be very late if we wait for the commission to finish its study,” Angara said.
Santiago said the commission would need at least six months or until March of next year to finish. But she said it should definitely come out with a proposal before the May 2009 deadline. Santiago added there was no reason to rush to beat the deadline, as the country must ensure it would do the right thing for its best interest.
Angara cautioned officials against making statements that would give the wrong impression to the public and to China.
“It is not good if we appear unprepared, unable to do even the first thing it needs, which is to delineate our territory. That is very detrimental to our interest,” he said.
“If the Philippines will not be able to meet this deadline, the extended continental shelf (ECS) areas which we are claiming can either be considered as part of the International Seabed Area, or the so called ‘Common Heritage of Mankind’ or be awarded to a neighbor state which filed and was able to prove its claim over the area,” Angara said in his Senate Bill 2181.
“Losing our extended continental shelf claim will have disastrous effects as the same contains mineral resources such as nickel and gold as well as living organisms belonging to the sedentary species which are primarily raw materials for pharmaceutical products,” he said.
“The Reed Alone reed bank, which is potential ECS for the Philippines, is said to contain the following energy resources: 3.9 cubic feet of gas, 35 million barrels of oil and 21 billion barrels of condensate. The Department of Energy puts the value of those resources at $19.9 million, $2.1 billion and $1.2 billion, respectively,” he added.
Pimentel said he agreed with Angara and added passing bills defining the national territory would not mean the Philippines would no longer settle disputes peacefully.
He said he was in favor of the proposal for the legislative and the executive departments to resolve the issue in closed-door meetings because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Pimentel filed Senate Bill 2144 which he lifted from House Bill 3216 of Cebu Rep. Antonio Cuenco, chairman of the House foreign relations committee. This includes the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG), also known as Spratlys, and the Scarborough Shoal in the country’s baselines.
Trillanes’ Senate Bill 1467 defines the country’s archipelagic baseline to include the Scarborough Shoal and designates the Kalayaan Island Group in the Spratlys as a “regime of islands” or islands that are naturally formed, surrounded by water and are above water at high tide. It is treated as any other land territory belonging to a country even though it is located more than 125 nautical miles away from the mainland.
Under Angara’s bill, the KIG will be part of other territories beyond the archipelagic baselines.
Reported by: Sol Jose Vanzi
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