The Arbitral Tribunal’s interpretation of paragraph 3 in Article 121: a first but important step forward
Franckx, E. (2018). The Arbitral Tribunal’s interpretation of paragraph 3 in Article 121: a first but important step forward, in: Jayakumar, S. et al.The South China Sea arbitration: the legal dimension. pp. 154-175. https://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781788116275.00016
In: Jayakumar, S. et al. (2018). The South China Sea arbitration: the legal dimension. Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham. ISBN 9781788116268; e-ISBN 9781788116275. 336 pp. https://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781788116275, more
International courts and tribunals have so far been persistent in refusing to give a specific content to the enigmatic Article 121, paragraph 3 of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, even though many occasions to do just that have presented themselves in the past. They were usually able to side-step this core issue of determining the exact legal nature of a particular maritime feature by relying on the law of maritime delimitation. The Arbitral Tribunal in the case initiated by the Philippines against China, however, was deprived of such an option as the People’s Republic of China had explicitly excluded delimitation matters from compulsory dispute settlement under the Convention. This chapter analyses this first, but important step forward in the clarification of Article 121, paragraph 3. Two specific elements of this clarification will be explored, namely the exact meaning of the term ‘rock’ and the grammatical conjunctions used in that paragraph.
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