14-nation South China Sea statement is an expansionist overreach

Jianlu Bi is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy in Focus think tank at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and a research fellow at the Charhar Institute in Beijing.On July 12, a coalition of 14 nations – the United States, Philippines, Australia, Canada, Britain, Japan, New Zealand, and seven European states including Germany, Italy and the Baltic nations – issued a statement marking the 10th anniversary of the South China Sea ruling at The Hague in 2016.The document recycled familiar arguments, urging compliance with the ruling and framing it as a cornerstone of the rules-based international order. But beneath it lies a fundamental disconnect from international law, historical reality and the contemporary political environment in Southeast Asia.To understand why the 2016 arbitral award remains a dead letter, one must return to the foundational principles of international law – specifically, the limits of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos). The South China Sea dispute is, at its core, a matter of territorial sovereignty over maritime features and subsequent maritime delimitation. Unclos, by its text and design, does not regulate sovereignty over land territory.