14-nation South China Sea statement is an expansionist overreach
The statement by 14 countries is a geopolitical exercise, amplifying the flawed 2016 Hague arbitral ruling to try to drive a wedge between China and its neighbours
Jianlu Bi is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy in Focus think tank at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and a research fellow at the Charhar Institute in Beijing.
On July 12, a coalition of 14 nations – the United States, Philippines, Australia, Canada, Britain, Japan, New Zealand, and seven European states including Germany, Italy and the Baltic nations – issued a statement marking the 10th anniversary of the South China Sea ruling at The Hague in 2016.
The document recycled familiar arguments, urging compliance with the ruling and framing it as a cornerstone of the rules-based international order. But beneath it lies a fundamental disconnect from international law, historical reality and the contemporary political environment in Southeast Asia.
To understand why the 2016 arbitral award remains a dead letter, one must return to the foundational principles of international law – specifically, the limits of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos). The South China Sea dispute is, at its core, a matter of territorial sovereignty over maritime features and subsequent maritime delimitation. Unclos, by its text and design, does not regulate sovereignty over land territory.
Furthermore, international law respects the principle of state consent. As early as 2006, China invoked Article 298 of Unclos, explicitly filing a declaration that excluded disputes concerning territorial sovereignty and maritime delimitation from compulsory arbitration. When the Philippines unilaterally initiated arbitration in 2013, it bypassed agreed-upon bilateral mechanisms. China has argued that the resulting tribunal overreached its mandate, deliberately misinterpreting the true scope of the dispute to manufacture jurisdiction where none existed.
Beijing maintains that its sovereignty in the region is rooted in centuries of historical practice dating back to the Western Han dynasty and continues to assert a claim of “historic rights”, although the 2016 arbitral tribunal found that there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources in areas falling within its “nine-dash line”. By classifying ancient, self-sustaining geographical features as mere rocks incapable of generating economic zones, the tribunal chose to distort geographical realities.
The composition of the group of nations behind the recent statement exposes the geopolitical nature of the exercise. Aside from the Philippines, not a single signatory is a littoral state of the South China Sea. The roster is dominated by the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance, a handful of non-littoral European nations, and Japan. What qualifies states located in the North Atlantic or Baltic Sea to dictate maritime boundaries in Southeast Asia? The reality is that this statement has little to do with upholding international law.
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