Former presidential spokesman Harry Roque on Friday said the Supreme Court (SC) decision declaring as unconstitutional the Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU) forged by the administration of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2005 with Vietnam and China “is wrong,” and hopes the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) will “file a comprehensive, convincing motion for reconsideration.”
Roque, an international law expert, commented on the SC’s recent decision in remarks at the New Year media party hosted by the Chinese Embassy in the Philippines.
Roque said one couldn’t apply the Constitution’s limits on foreign involvement in natural resource exploration on an area that is only covered by “sovereign rights” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, such as that area delineated in the JMSU.
“That decision is wrong; it simply is wrong,” Roque said.
According to Roque, the reported SC decision—a copy of which no one has seen yet—poses a “new challenge” to Philippines-China relations that was recently boosted with President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.’s state visit to Beijing.
Under the JMSU, which expired in 2008, the Philippines, China and Vietnam, through their respective national oil corporations, agreed to conduct joint explorations of the disputed South China Sea covering 142,886 square kilometers (agreement area).
However, up to 80 percent of the JMSU site is within the Philippines’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone, prompting the filing of petitions seeking to declare the agreement as unconstitutional.