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THE LEGAL STATUS OF SPRATLY ISLAND IN SOUTH CHINA SEA ACCORDING TO INTERNATIONAL LAW
MARIO BUNGARAN SIREGAR 110110080090
ABSTRACT
One of the classical cases yet still occurs until now is territorial and jurisdictional case, which often happens between countries. Even these days, the deployment of the military forces is used by country to defend its territory from the threat of other countries. Taking a close watch to South East Asian region, South China Sea is a prolonged conflict area among countries around it. The Spratly Island, located in South China Sea, is known as the contestation between South East Asian countries, namely Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, and other countries which are China and Taiwan. Various kinds of principles are stated by each country in order to get the ownership of Spratly Island, creating the overlapping claims toward this area. The absence of an obvious territorial boundary arrangement also exacerbates the uncertainty of the islands in Spratly area.
The attempts to discuss the ownership of Spratly Island has been conducted several times, one of them is the statement of DOC of Parties In the South China Sea in 2002 which was agreed by ASEAN members and followed by the making of Code of Conduct for South China Sea that still continues up to now. However, this attempt can’t guarantee the end of Spratly Island ownership conflict because of the different approach applied by country, in this case is China.
This research was conducted by using descriptive research method to get a comprehensive and systematic image about legal norms, principles, and knowledge which are found in the existing rule of law that can be applied to analyze the case and by normative juridical approach which emphasized on literature study to learn the secondary data collected, that is the existing materials and their relations with the case. Furthermore, examining the data in qualitative juridical way resulted in analytical descriptive data.
