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PARTY-LIST group representatives asked the Supreme Court
on Wednesday to declare null and void for being
unconstitutional the Tripartite Agreement for Joint
Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU) in the Agreement Area
in the South China Sea, which the Philippines entered
into with China and Vietnam.
Reps.
Satur Ocampo and Teodoro Casiño (Bayan Muna), Liza Maza
and Luzviminda Ilagan (Gabriela Women’s Party), Lorenzo
R. Tañada and Teofisto L. Guingona III and the late
Crispin Beltran (Anakpawis) also sought the Court’s
immediate issuance of a temporary restraining order
and/or preliminary injunction to prevent the government
from further implementing the agreement in the meantime.
Beltran, who died suddenly on Tuesday after falling from
the roof of his bungalow, was included as coauthor, as
he had long indicated his intent to join the petition.
As the
party-list bloc was filing its suit against JMSU, the
Senate foreign relations committee endorsed for plenary
approval Joint Resolution 12 creating a Congressional
Commission on National Territory, amid unresolved issues
over limits of the country’s continental shelf and its
exclusive economic zone, as well as claims of
sovereignty over the disputed Kalayaan Island Group and
the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea.
In her
sponsorship speech, Sen. Miriam Santiago, committee
chairman, explained that the proposed congressional
commission shall “centralize and integrate all
legislative work on the national territory through the
expertise and facilities which the commission will
organize in aid of legislation in order to give Congress
a totality of outlook in crafting approaches to our
predicaments.”
Santiago
said, “So far, the approaches taken in dealing with
territorial problems are piecemeal and crisis-oriented,
apparently on the assumption that national territory is
fragmented into separate issues, each to be resolved by
disconnected attempts and thus resulting in half-way and
makeshift solutions,” she added. “We are a nation entire
by itself and, metaphorically, we cannot approach our
territorial problems island by island.”
The
proposed commission, she said, shall be composed of 10
members of equal representation from both the Senate and
the House of Representatives, which shall be tasked to
“submit a scholarly background paper from experts in
international law, geology, hydrography, and geophysics,
among others, as an authoritative reference for use in
public hearings and plenary debates on the existing
bills.”
The
joint resolution gives the Commission a fixed deadline,
not later than December 31, 2008, to submit to Congress
a printed Report on National Territory which will set
out the results of its study.
She
pointed out that barely a year from now, on May 13,
2009, the Philippines has to decide whether to submit
its formal claim for an Extended Continental Shelf
provided for all archipelagic states by the 1982 United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or Unclos.
“The apparent prevailing thought is that we should make
a submission and unfortunately, time is running out on
us,” she said.
The
tripartite agreement, or JMSU, questioned in the high
court was signed March 14, 2005 by representatives from
Philippine National Oil Company, a government-owned and
controlled corporation, and China National Offshore Oil
Corp. (CNOOC), a state-owned oil company, and Vietnam
Oil and Gas Corp., also a state-owned oil company.
The
agreement allows signatories to conduct joint research
of petroleum resource potential of a certain area of the
South China Sea
as a pre-exploration activity. The agreement covers an
area of 142,886 square kilometers of Philippine
archipelagic waters.
Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, in response to the
news of the filing of the petition in court, said, “That
JMSU is a private undertaking of the three companies
that are undertaking those research work. So until such
time that it is declared unconstitutional, we would go
by the stipulation of the contract that it is a private
undertaking. . . .At the moment, we know that there is
nothing unconstitutional about it when it was entered
into by PNOC with Vietnam Oil Company and the PROC Oil
Co.”
The
party-list petitioners argued in their petition,
however, that the unconstitutionality of the accord lies
in allowing the large-scale exploration for petroleum
and other mineral oils by corporations wholly-owned by
foreign states, which is in violation of Article XII,
Section 2 of the Constitution that states “exploration,
development, and utilization of natural resources shall
be under the full control and supervision of the State.”
The
petitioners maintained that “regardless of whether or
not the State has such full control and supervision, the
tripartite agreement itself, its execution, and its
continued implementation are still unconstitutional for
the simple reason that the coequal parties of the PNOC
in the joint venture, joint undertaking, or joint
partnership in the large-scale exploration of our
petroleum and other mineral oils are aliens or
foreign-owned corporations—CNOOC and Petro Vietnam—and
worse, corporations wholly-owned by foreign countries,”
they added.
It
further argued that even if the agreement were merely
for a pre-exploration activity, all the data and
information acquired were to be jointly owed by the
parties, which is clear proof that the Philippines has
conceded or forfeited its ownership over its petroleum
and other mineral oils.
For such
agreements to be lawful, the petitioners said the
agreement with foreign entities should only be for
technical or financial assistance.
“First,
the tripartite agreement is not a State undertaking by
itself directly and solely.... Second, the tripartite
agreement is not a State undertaking by coproduction,
joint venture or production sharing agreements…
Evidently, the tripartite agreement does not involve
either technical or financial assistance for large-scale
exploration of petroleum or other mineral oils within
the contemplation of the 1987 Philippine Constitution.”
The
petitioners said respondents compromised the Philippine
claim over the disputed Spratly Group of
Islands by allowing the implementation of the questioned tripartite agreement.
They
said that one-sixth or 24,000 square kilometers of the
agreement area is closest to the Philippine coastline,
and clearly outside the claims by China and Vietnam or
any other country.
The
agreement area also covers six islands claimed and
occupied by the Philippines in the Spratlys such as
Pagasa Island, Likas Island, Lawak Island, Kota Island,
Patag Island, and Panata Island. (With Mia Gonzalez,
Butch Fernandez) |
