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Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Praises Treaty The Senate GOP Rejected

By Hayes Brown on Jan 29, 2013 at 3:12 pm

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) Photo: AP

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) today said China and the Philippines should settle a dispute via a measure enshrined in the Law of the Sea treaty, a treaty that his Senate colleagues killed last year.

China has been engaged in territorial disputes with several of its neighbors — including Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam — over ownership of several small island chains and their potential natural resources for years now. The Obama administration has been seeking to broker a diplomatic solution to the conflict, urging negotiation through various forums.

Taking that advice to heart, the Philippines has filed an arbitration claim against China at International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea, in an effort to gain a binding decision on the matter. Congressman Royce, currently traveling as part of a delegation to the Philippines, added his voice to the plea that China participate in the proceedings:

“It is best that China joins the process so that we can move forward under international law,” the California Republican told The Associated Press after meeting Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario and other diplomats in Manila.

“We want to calm the tensions,” Royce said. “We want this approached from the standpoint of diplomacy, and that is what we are conveying because in that way we don’t create crisis which roils the markets or creates uncertainty.”

Royce’s position is perfectly sensible and speaks to the importance of the role that arbitration plays in solving international disputes before they reach the point of violence. The United States, however, would be unable to avail itself of the Tribunal’s arbitration to get itself out of similar maritime quarrels. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which forms the authority of the Tribunal, has yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, despite being signed in 1994.

UNCLOS came closer than it ever has to acheiving the two-thirds vote necessary to come into effect during the last Congress. Support for treaty poured in from almost all sides — including in testimony from representatives of big business such as the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, members of the military, and five former Republican Secretaries of States — urging ratification.

The treaty still died at the hands of Republicans in the Senate, who seemed to take the word of conspiracy theorists over American interests. It may eventually come that the U.S. will require aid similar to the Philippines in working with China, aid that UNCLOS won’t be able to provide.

Health

Catholic Countries Slowly Move Toward More Progressive Reproductive Health Policies

By Sy Mukherjee on Dec 19, 2012 at 6:20 pm

A sex education and contraception access bill that had languished for over a decade passed the Philippines’ House of Representatives by a 133-79 vote margin this week — putting the conservative Catholic country on track to enacting more extensive reproductive health care legislation than ever before, including a more progressive policy on sexual education than the United States currently has.

As the New York Times reports, the so-called “RH bill” — which requires schools in the Philippines to teach accurate sex education classes and expands contraception access in poor, rural areas — had already passed the Senate. Now the two legislative houses will work to reconcile minor differences between their respective versions of the bill in order to enshrine it into law.

If passed, the law could make the Philippines more progressive than the United States on some reproductive health issues. The U.S. still doesn’t mandate comprehensive sexual education — allowing many public school students to receive ineffective and misleading “abstinence-only” education instead — and the Catholic Church has waged a full-scale war against the health reform law’s provision to expand access to affordable contraception. Even though Catholics in the U.S. overwhelmingly support birth control, and don’t even particularly oppose Obamacare’s birth control mandate, that hasn’t stopped the Catholic hierarchy from largely dominating the political conversation about women’s health issues.

Despite its recent progress on reproductive health issues, however, the Philippines still has strict anti-abortion laws typical of many Catholic countries. But there does seem to be some indication that — even in Catholic countries — slow gains are being made toward greater reproductive freedom. In Ireland, after worldwide outcry over the miscarriage-related death of a woman who was denied an emergency abortion, Irish lawmakers moved this week to consider loosening the country’s strict abortion laws.

NEWS FLASH

Filipino LGBT Group Picks Up Hillary Clinton’s Call For Equality | LGBT groups in the Philippines are calling on the government to address violence and other human rights violations against the LGBT community. In their formal demand, the alliance of groups reminded leaders that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had warned that U.S. aid would be tied to a country’s efforts to protect LGBT individuals from persecution.

Update

Instinct Magazine points out that Clinton’s address also sparked protests in Sierra Leone:

Close to 1,000 protesters thronged the streets at the east end of Freetown attracting scores of onlookers on the process who cheered them on.

The post Friday prayer demonstration was organised by the Inveterate International Islamic Revitalists, who said they were worried that persistent pronouncements from major powers could influence the country`s politicians to recognise “alien” and “immoral” practices in the country.

The organisers say the protests will be a bi-weekly affair. Sheikh Marrah, one of the leaders of the protesters, referred to a recent statement by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton who said US would use aide to encourage the respect of the rights of gays and lesbians.

NEWS FLASH

Over 1,000 Confirmed Dead In Philippine Floods From Typhoon Washi | Tropical storm Washi, known locally in the Philippines as Sendong, has killed over 1000 people in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, dumping over a foot of water onto mountains denuded by deforestation, sweeping away entire villages and flooding the cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan with devastating mudslides. “The latest tally showed a total of 1,002 people have been confirmed dead, including 650 in Cagayan de Oro and an additional 283 in nearby Iligan city, said Benito Ramos, head of the Civil Defense Office.” More than 33,000 people will spend Christmas and New Year’s in emergency shelters. Philippine President Benigno Aquino declared a ban on logging in February after torrential floods killed dozens but weak law enforcement and corruption makes it a recurring problem.” Washi is now poised to make landfall in Malaysia and threatens southern Thailand, already wracked by the costliest floods in the nation’s history, with further floods.

By Brad Johnson on Dec 21, 2011 at 12:07 pm

NEWS FLASH

Typhoon Washi Floods In Philippines Leave 1400 Dead Or Missing | More than 652 people have been killed and 800 people are missing after Typhoon Washi slammed the southern Philippines with a wall of water late Friday night, turning mountainsides into torrents of mud that swept houses out to sea. Cagayan de Oro and nearby Iligan cities in eight provinces on Mindanao island were worst hit, a region that in the past rarely saw tropical storms. Almost 35,000 people are in evacuation centers in the city of Cagayan de Oro alone. NASA scientists helped monitor the storm and warn residents about its gathering threat.

By Brad Johnson on Dec 18, 2011 at 12:55 pm

NEWS FLASH

Catholic Bishops Oppose LGBT Protections In The Philippines | Catholic bishops have raised concerns about a proposed bill in the Philippines that would ban all forms of discrimination, including any based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Members of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) are protesting that the protections would violate their alleged religious right to discriminate against LGBT people, and one of their lawyers even claimed that under the law, a priest could be jailed for 25 years for refusing to perform a same-sex marriage. (HT: Queerty.)

Yglesias

The Philippines as Strategic Blunder

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 28, 2009 at 5:26 pm

waroffrontier

Historian David Silbey, author of A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 has a very enlightening post bolstering the argument I made yesterday that “victory” in the Philippines wasn’t really worth anything. He observes that “the Philippines, in addition to being seen as a new frontier for Americans, was also to be the first great acquisition for an American Empire” but nothing really ever came of it. As early as 1915, observers like Robert Johnson could see that the Philippines was not actually useful as a military asset:

The taking of the Philippines may be ranked among the worst military blunders committed by any American government—it is difficult to put the matter more strongly. It is a weak, ex-centric military position, fundamentally indefensible against any strong transpacific power, but inevitably a magnet to draw troops and ships away from our shores.

And of course this proved to be the case when the United States went to war with Japan. Far from providing a U.S. military asset in the region, it was simply a hard-to-defend position that got overrun. Silbey argues, however, that U.S. occupation of the Philippines did contribute to the deterioration in U.S.-Japanese relations and thus ultimately to our need to fight a costly war in the Pacific.

The specifics of the Philippines aside, I would just emphasize that it’s usually the case that these imperial adventures don’t wind up paying the freight. Nationalists and militarists are perpetually imagining that control of some patch of foreign land (and perhaps the natural resources beneath it) will pay some vast dividends but there’s little practical or theoretical reason to think this will be the case.

Yglesias

Was Conquering the Philippines Worth It?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 27, 2009 at 11:27 am

Manila skyline (wikimedia)

Manila skyline (wikimedia)

Ross Douthat offers a pregnant historical analogy:

These twists and turns make Iraq look less like either Vietnam or World War II — the analogies that politicians and pundits keep closest at hand — and more like an amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines. Like Iraq, those were murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs. Like Iraq, they were wars that Americans were eager to forget about as soon as they were finished.

I think the Iraq-Philippines analogy is an interesting one, because it’s something that both proponents and detractors of American imperialism can embrace as illustrative. I recall that George W. Bush himself analogized his imperial adventure in Iraq to McKinley’s in the Pacific. And while the situations don’t bear any resemblance in detail, there is a certain vague similarity in that while I would say counterinsurgency in the Philippines “worked” it’s hard for me to see that it actually achieved anything. I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse? What “long-term benefits” actually accrued to us as a result of the counterinsurgency effort?

It seems to me that unless you look at victory and conquest as being their own reward, it’s hard to see any. Anti-American rebels lost, but we didn’t really win anything of note. We spent a lot of money, suffered some casualties, killed a lot of people and in exchange got some military bases that were overrun by the Japanese as soon as it looked like they might be strategically useful.

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