Philippines has evidence of sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal

The Philippine Supreme Court ruled in 1916 on a shipwreck in the Scarborough Shoal area.

A previous lawsuit filed by the Philippines has strengthened its claim to sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, which is currently disputed between Manila and Beijing, legal experts said on July 19.

Location of Scarborough Shoal in the East Sea (photo: Internet)

An international law expert asserts that a 1916 Philippine Supreme Court ruling on a shipwreck in the Scarborough Shoal (known as Huangyan Island in China) is evidence to strengthen Manila's claim to the shoal.

Dr. Jay Batongbacal of the University of the Philippines College of Law said on July 18 that his research results “are clear evidence that the Philippines has exercised its right to administer justice over Panatag Shoal and the incidents that occurred there during the period when the Philippines was a colony of the United States.”

Relations between the Philippines and China have been strained over the Scarborough Shoal, which both countries claim. China claims almost the entire South China Sea, including Scarborough Shoal. The Philippines says the shoal lies entirely within its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone.

Dr Batongbacal also questioned Beijing's claim to the Scarbrough Shoal, saying it first discovered the shoal based on a 1279 map from the Yuan Dynasty.

“At that time, China was part of the Yuan-Mongol empire. By this logic, Huangyan Island was completely under Mongolian sovereignty,” the expert emphasized.

The disputed shoal between the Philippines and China is called Scarborough Shoal after a British tea merchant ship of the same name that sank there in the late 1800s. At a July 18 lecture on Philippine maritime interests, Dr. Batongbacal presented a Yuan Dynasty map. “This Yuan Dynasty map cannot even identify Luzon Island and Mindanao Islands correctly,” he stressed. “So China has not yet made public its 1279 map. On the contrary, there are maps dated in the 1700s that prove that Scarborough Shoal belongs to the Philippines.”

Furthermore, according to Dr. Batongbacal, a 1916 court hearing in Manila dated China's official recognition of the shoal as part of its territorial waters under the name of the Zhongsha Islands to 1913.

The 1916 trial concerned the S. Snippon, a Swedish cargo ship that ran aground on Scarbrough Shoal on 8 May 1913 while en route from Manila to Singapore.

A ship named Manchuria was the first to reach and rescue the captain of the SS Nippon and his crew. They were taken to Hong Kong where the captain said they would arrange for the SS Nippon and its cargo to be rescued.

News of the stranding of the SS Nippon prompted the salvage company Erlanger & Galinger to dispatch a team to rescue the ship, unload all the cargo on board, bring the ship back to Manila and sell all the salvaged goods.
Salvage firm Erlanger & Galinger then took legal action against the cargo insurers and the shipowners of the SS Nippon after it found that it had not received adequate “compensation” for the “dangerous” service it had performed.

Dr Batongbacal said that if China's claims to Scarborough Shoal were valid, Beijing “would have had an agency responsible for what happened there, including shipwrecks and strandings”.
He concluded that “the incident of the S.Snippon is proof that the Philippines is the only country responsible for resolving shipwrecks or strandings in the Scarborough archipelago”./.

According to VNA - DT