Philippines willing to share S. China Sea even if it wins legal challenge

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Philippines is willing to share natural resources with Beijing in contested South China Sea areas even if it wins a legal challenge next week, Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay told AFP Friday, July 8, the news agency reports.

Yasay said President Rodrigo Duterte's administration hoped to quickly begin direct talks with China following Tuesday's verdict, with the negotiations to cover jointly exploiting natural gas reserves and fishing grounds within the Philippines' exclusive economic zone.

"We can even have the objective of seeing how we can jointly explore this territory: how we can utilise and benefit mutually from the utilisation of the resources in this exclusive economic zone where claims are overlapping," Yasay told AFP in an interview.

The Philippines, under Benigno Aquino's previous administration, filed in 2013 a legal challenge with a UN-backed tribunal in The Hague contesting China's claims to nearly all of the strategically vital sea.

China's claims reach almost to the coasts of the Philippines and some other Southeast Asian nations, and it has in recent years built giant artificial islands in the disputed areas to enforce what it says are its indisputable sovereign rights.

The Philippines' case enraged China, which repeatedly vowed to ignore the tribunal's ruling and is currently holding military drills in the northern part of the sea as a show of force.

Duterte, who took office on June 30, has adopted a more conciliatory approach to China than Aquino.

The previous president refused to hold direct talks, and likened China's expansionist efforts in the sea to Nazi Germany's march on parts of Europe ahead of World War II.