Dr. Jose Antonio "Ka Pep" Goitia restates the Philippines' legal position on Mischief Reef, arguing that China's continued construction and military presence does not override the binding 2016 Arbitral Award.
A Principle Worth Repeating
Some arguments need to be made only once. Others need to be made again and again, not because they have grown weaker with repetition, but because the party on the other side of the argument keeps acting as though it was never settled. The Philippines’ legal position on Mischief Reef falls into the second category, and Dr. Jose Antonio “Ka Pep” Goitia has taken up the task of restating it plainly.
“China cannot turn water cannons into international law,” Goitia said. The line is blunt by design. It compresses a decade of legal history and ongoing maritime confrontation into a single, unambiguous statement: force does not create legal rights, no matter how long or how forcefully it is applied.
What the 2016 Ruling Actually Found
The 2016 South China Sea Arbitral Award, issued by a tribunal constituted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, made specific and binding findings about Mischief Reef. The tribunal found it to be a low-tide elevation situated within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and continental shelf, and therefore incapable of appropriation as sovereign territory by any state, including China. It further found that China’s construction activity at the reef, undertaken without Philippine authorization, violated the Philippines’ sovereign rights under UNCLOS.
Goitia’s framing repeatedly emphasizes a detail that is easy to lose in the broader geopolitical noise surrounding the South China Sea dispute: the ruling is final and binding. It is not a preliminary finding awaiting further negotiation. It is not one interpretation among several equally valid alternatives. Under the framework both the Philippines and China agreed to when they ratified UNCLOS, the tribunal’s determination on Mischief Reef settled the legal question definitively.
The Gap Between Law and Behavior
What Goitia’s commentary highlights is the persistent gap between that legal settlement and China’s continued behavior at the site. “Building on a reef does not create sovereignty over it,” he said. “Neither do artificial islands, military installations, or coast guard deployments.” Yet Beijing has continued to act, in Goitia’s words, “as though persistence can outlast the law,” maintaining and expanding infrastructure at a location the tribunal has already ruled outside its legal claim.
This is the core of the argument Goitia is making: physical presence, however sustained, does not retroactively legitimize a claim that international law has already rejected. Treating de facto control as equivalent to legal sovereignty would effectively reward whichever party is willing to apply the most sustained physical pressure, rendering the arbitration process, and by extension the broader framework of international maritime law, meaningless for any state without the naval capacity to match a more powerful neighbor.
Why Small Nations Need the Law to Matter
This is where the Mischief Reef question connects to a broader principle Goitia has returned to across his commentary on Philippine sovereignty: the significance of international law is disproportionately important for smaller nations. A powerful state can, in theory, defend its interests through raw military or economic capacity. A country like the Philippines cannot compete with China on that basis. Its strongest asset in this dispute is the binding legal ruling secured in 2016, and its strongest strategy is insisting, repeatedly and without concession, that the ruling be honored.
This is why Goitia’s restatement of the Mischief Reef ruling matters even though the legal facts have not changed since 2016. Every instance of China acting as though the ruling does not apply is an attempt to erode its practical significance through repetition and normalization. Every instance of the Philippines restating the ruling clearly and refusing to treat the dispute as unsettled is a counter to that erosion.
The Argument That Does Not Change
Goitia’s position on Mischief Reef is not new, and he does not present it as new. It is the same argument the Philippines has made consistently since the tribunal issued its ruling: the law is settled, the facts are documented, and continued construction or military presence at the reef does not alter either. What changes, over time, is whether that argument continues to be made clearly enough, and consistently enough, that its erosion through sheer repetition of contrary behavior does not succeed. Goitia’s restatement is a small but deliberate contribution to ensuring it does not.