Interview: Argentine expert says South China Sea award riddled with inconsistencies

The arbitral tribunal's award against China on the South China Sea lacked legitimacy and was riddled with inconsistencies, an Argentine expert said on Thursday.

The inconsistencies in the legal process were like "covering one eye and saying one thing, and then covering the other eye to say the opposite thing," Pablo Ferrara, a lawyer with a PhD in International Law of the Sea from the University of California at Berkeley told Xinhua.

"The award says it is not going to deal with questions of sovereignty, above all regarding historic appellations and historic maritime areas claimed by China, but it then analyzes the exercise of this sovereignty," he said.

There was a contradiction, the legal expert said, adding that "in the International Law of the Sea, land projects over the water, and everything that happens on the sea, except the high seas, are the logical extension of the sovereignty exercised on land."

The original dispute fell beyond the tribunal's jurisdiction and the tribunal "distorted China's statements," Ferrara said.

The tribunal kept the suited parts to insinuate the award into the legal framework while discarded the unsuited parts to ignore any topics supporting any position favorable to China, he said.

Clear bias was also inherent in the tribunal, Ferrara added.

The tribunal, from a political perspective, was not ethically composed, he said, adding that no judge "is of Asian nationality."

The Philippines was represented by lawyers from a country (U.S.) that doesn't join in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and by the United Kingdom, the great instigator of conflicts of sovereignty around the world, he added.

The tribunal had overreached its authority, the expert said.

It claimed that existing negotiations between Beijing and Manila under the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) "did not exempt" China from the ruling, because any accords reached by such talks would "not be legal documents," he said.

However, in general, tribunals abstain from interfering in matters being negotiated, Ferrara said, adding that he was surprised at intervention by the tribunal.

The ad hoc arbitral tribunal in The Hague announced on Tuesday its award against China over the South China Sea case unilaterally initiated by the Philippines.

"It's an almost Manichean award," Ferrara said, connoting an overly simplified world view where good battles evil.

He had "quite a negative" opinion on the ruling, and said the unfavorable result for China was an unpleasant surprise.

Ferrara was an academic both at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany and the Groningen Center of Energy Law in the Netherlands.

In 2014, he was designated assistant professor of the South China Sea Institute (SCSI) at China's Xiamen University. Endi