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from PHILIPPINES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2015
The Philippines should make up its mind on the various controversial issues surrounding the definition of the Philippines’ territory and maritime regimes and take definitive national positions on them.
The current Philippine Constitution, ratified in a plebiscite in 1987, defines the Philippines’ national territory thus:
The national territory comprises the Philippine archipelago, with all the islands and waters embraced therein, and all other territories over which the Philippines has sovereignty or jurisdiction, consisting of its terrestrial, fluvial and aerial domains, including its territorial sea, the seabed, the subsoil, the insular shelves, and other submarine areas. The waters around, between, and connecting the islands of the archipelago, regardless of their breadth and dimensions, form part of the internal waters of the Philippines.
The 1935 Philippine Constitution, which had been drafted and promulgated under American colonial rule but continued to govern the Philippines until the 1973 Constitution supplanted it, specifically cited the Treaty of Paris of 1898, through which Spain, having lost the Spanish–American war, handed over to the United States sovereignty over the Philippines, as well as over Puerto Rico and Guam. In the treaty, Spain also gave up all its rights in Cuba. The provision on the national territory in that constitution stated:
The Philippines comprises all the territory ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris concluded between the United States and Spain on the tenth day of December, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, the limits of which are set forth in Article III of said treaty, together with all the islands embraced in the treaty concluded at Washington between the United States and Spain on the seventh day of November, nineteen hundred, and the treaty concluded between the United States and Great Britain on the second day of January, nineteen hundred and thirty, and all territory over which the present Government of the Philippine Islands exercises jurisdiction.
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