ON SC JUSTICE CARPIO’S COMMENT RE: CHINA CONSTRUCTION ON SCARBOROUGH SHOAL

March 22, 2017

We join Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio in urging President Duterte to reconsider his public pronouncement that we cannot do anything should China build on the shoal. We cannot simply say we are helpless when 300,000 square kilometers of our territorial waters, an area of about 381,000 square kilometers of our national territory is being annexed by a foreign power. It’s even bigger than the total land area of the Philippines.

Given such an area, we just cannot say, “Walang magagawa.”