TWO more bills recommending that the Kalayaan Island Groups (KIG) in the disputed Spratlys group be declared a “regime of islands” have been filed in Congress.
The proposals, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Rodolfo Biazon and in the House of Representatives by Ilocos Norte Rep. Ferdinand Marcos Jr., bring to five the number of baseline bills pending in the legislature.
Earlier, Sen. Edgardo Angara filed Senate Bill 2181 that also seeks to treat the KIG as a regime of islands under Article 121 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
A regime of islands essentially means whoever owns the island also owns the waters around it.
The three bills are quiet on Scarborough Shoal in the vicinity of Zambales.
Detained Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV’s Senate Bill 1467 defines the country’s archipelagic baseline to include the Scarborough Shoal but designates the KIG as a regime of islands.
House Bill 3216, which consolidates the bills of Representatives Antonio Cuenco, Raul del Mar and Raul Gonzalez Jr. and passed second reading last December, on the other hand, includes Scarborough Shoal and the KIG in the archipelagic baseline.
Malacanang, however, prefers that these be classified as regimes of islands.
In a statement, Biazon, chairman of the Senate committee on national defense and security, said his bill reconciles conflicting laws on the country’s national territory, including the Constitution, Republic Acts 3046 and 5446, with UNCLOS, and reiterates Philippine sovereignty over the KIG.
“Defining baselines will provide reference points which will be used as the basis for a definition of the extent of our inland waters, territorial seas, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones, continental shelf and extended continental shelf,” he said.
The UN has given countries until May 2009 to submit scientific data on the extended continental shelf they are claiming. — Yvonne T. Chua
