Magallona vs. Hon. Ermita, et al. (Political Law)

Magallona vs. Hon. Ermita, et al.

 G.R. 187167, August 16, 2011

• Baseline laws, such as R.A. 9522, are nothing but statutory mechanisms for UNCLOS III-States-parties to delimit with precision the extent of their maritime zones and continental shelves. It gives notice to the rest of the international community of the scope of the maritime space and submarine areas within which States-parties exercise treaty bases rights (right of sovereignty; right to enforce customs, fiscal, immigration and sanitation laws; right to exploit resources).

• UNCLOS III and its ancillary baseline laws play no role in the acquisition or diminution of territory, because under traditional international law typology, states acquire or lose territory through occupation, accretion, cession, and prescription, not by executing multilateral treaties on the standard of sea-use rights or enacting statutes to comply with treaty terms to delimit maritime zones and continental shelves.'

• Kalayaan Island Group and the Scarborough Shoal lie outside the baselines drawn around the Philippine archipelago. However, the Philippines’ continued claim of sovereignty and jurisdiction over such islands was committed to text through RA 9522’s use of the framework of Regime of Islands, under which islands located at an ‘appreciable distance from the nearest shoreline of the Philippine archipelago’ generate their own applicable maritime zones. Such classification of the KIG and Scarborough Shoal made by the Congress manifests the Philippines’ compliance with its pacta sunt servanda obligation under the UNCLOS III.

• The fact of sovereignty does not preclude the operation of municipal and international law norms subjecting the territorial sea or archipelagic waters to necessary burdens in the interest of maintaining unimpeded, expeditious international navigation, consistent with the international law principle of freedom of navigation. The imposition of these passage rights through archipelagic waters under UNCLOS III was a concession by archipelagic States, in exchange for their right to claim all the waters landward of their baselines, regardless of their depth or distance from the coast, as archipelagic waters subject to their territorial sovereignty.

•  UNCLOS III creates a sui generis maritime space – the exclusive economic zone – in waters previously part of the high seas.