Roque: ‘Filipinos don’t need consent to conduct maritime research in PH rise’

I wish to correct the article, “Roque clarifies disputed PH Rise remarks” (News, 1/26/18), concerning my remarks during a press briefing where I was asked about Philippine Rise.

I reiterate that my pronouncements on the said briefing have to be taken in their entirety. Transcripts of the briefing show that in fact, I said that, “You do not need any permit for any Filipino corporation to conduct scientific investigation in Benham Rise because it is ours. So that’s not something that [requires that] a consent has to be given by the government.”

I never said that “no one in the country had applied for a permit to study the continental shelf east of Isabela province, and that no Filipino could do so because of the research’s prohibitive costs,” as reporter DJ Yap wrote.

Again, as Filipinos, we do not need consent to conduct scientific investigation in Philippine Rise because it is subject to our sovereign rights, which includes the right to conduct scientific research.

I assure you that applicable protocols are in place to make sure our interests over Philippine Rise are protected. We do not want a repeat of the problems we encountered in the Joint Maritime Seismic Understanding during the Arroyo administration.

In law school, we were taught to avoid “legal embryology”—the tendency to pick out concepts and interpret them without regard for their proper place in the complexity of the legal system or argument; in my many years as a lawyer who dealt regularly with the media, I could very well see journalists sometimes falling into the analogical habit of “journalistic embryology,” if I may call it that.

The culprit, I suspect, is a predetermined view of a complex issue, through which every pronouncement of a news subject is reported and interpreted for the larger public.

Thus, no matter how hard I try to distinguish between sovereign rights and full sovereignty equivalent to a title of ownership in international law, news stories could only frame my statements along the inflammatory narrative of the government selling out our national patrimony.

Perhaps, there is also the function of journalistic competence at play here; I know international law—especially the Law of the Sea—is a complex subject even for lawyers, but it is the duty of newspapers to ensure that their reporters know what they report on.

H. HARRY L. ROQUE,
presidential spokesperson