Vietnam considers taking China to court over territorial dispute

By Demetri Sevastopulo in Hong Kong

The Financial Times

22 May 2014

Vietnam is considering taking China to international court to resolve an increasingly dangerous dispute over contested waters in the resource-rich South China Sea.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung told Reuters that Vietnam was contemplating measures, including legal action. Ernie Bowers, a southeast Asia expert at CSIS, said Hanoi was considering following the Philippines by filing a case with the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague.

“They are seriously considering it. I’d put it at 75 per cent probability,” said Mr Bowers who is familiar with the debate in Vietnam over whether to proceed.

China and Vietnam have longstanding territorial disputes over the South China Sea, and particularly the Paracel Islands. But tensions have escalated dramatically over the past three weeks after China moved a huge deep-sea rig to the area and started drilling for energy resources for the first time.

More than 100 Chinese and Vietnamese ships have been engaged in a tense stand-off near the rig, which is located near Triton Island in the Paracels. China won control of the island group in 1974 following a brief conflict with Vietnam. Angry Vietnamese mobs last week protested the presence of the oil rig by ransacking foreign factories in Vietnam.

The China-Vietnam spat is just one of several increasingly dangerous rows that Beijing has with its neighbours. China and Japan are at loggerheads over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which Japan controls but China claims and calls the Diaoyu.

In the South China Sea, Bejing has also been more aggressive in asserting claims over areas near the Philippines. Chinese ships have repeatedly tried to block Philippine boats from resupplying an old ship at the Second Thomas Shoal in the disputed Spratly Islands. Last week, Manila accused China of breaching a regional code of conduct byreclaiming land at Johnson South for a possible runway.

In March, Manila responded to the increasingly aggressive Chinese actions by forging ahead with a landmark arbitration case at The Hague. The Philippines wants the tribunal – which rules on disputes related to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – to declare that China’s so-called “nine-dash line” is invalid.

Southeast Asian countries and the US are concerned about the line, a demarcation on Chinese maps that suggests Beijing lays claim to most of the South China Sea. China unveiled a version of the line in 1947, but in 2009 it attached a copy of the line in a formal submission to the UN. Earlier this year, the US asked China publicly for the first time to clarify what the line actually means.

A move by Vietnam to pursue the same course as the Philippines would anger China, which prefers to negotiate bilaterally with countries over such disputes. But some countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and particularly the Philippines, now believe that the only way smaller countries can stand up to China is to internationalise the South China Sea disputes.

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Kurt Campbell, the former Obama administration top diplomat for east Asia, recently said the US had decided to take a more aggressive approach in pressing China over the nine-dash line because Asean was becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress from talks with Beijing.

Last week, Le Luong Minh, Asean’s secretary-general who is also Vietnamese, urged China to leave Vietnam’s territorial waters to ease the crisis at the Paracels, sparking a harsh rebuke from Beijing which said he had “ignored the facts, violated Asean’s neutral stance and unilaterally sent out the wrong signals”.

Twitter: @AsiaNewsDemetri

Additional reporting by Julie Zhu