Arbitration ‘award’: A P1-billion useless piece of paper

PRESIDENT Duterte was absolutely correct when he remarked the other night that the “award” (i.e., ruling) of the arbitration suit that the Aquino 3rd administration brought against China in 2013 was a useless “piece of paper.”

It is useless, since the “award,” after extensively discussing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) provisions and the Philippine claims for 500 pages, does not order China to do anything. It even emphasized that its “award” was “without prejudice to any questions of sovereignty or maritime boundary delimitation.”