From declaring that it will not abide by any Unclos ruling against it, it would not be such a large step for China to depart from Unclos altogether – particularly since the US has never joined – and insist that its new positions in the South China Sea be given a wide berth by others, in the surrounding waters and in the skies overhead.
Australia's opening legal gambit a jurisdictional claim that the cmats treaty had already settled the border dispute was dismissed by the conciliation commission in September 2016, which found that Australia's obligation to settle the boundary survived the treaty and its purported moratorium (unclos Conciliation Commission 2016).
In 2013, The Philippines filed an ongoing lawsuit at the UN International Court of Arbitration, questioning the legality of China's territorial claims and its development of tidal reefs that are only periodically above water, which it alleges violates the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos).
The contrast with Canberra's own behavior its refusal to discuss a boundary in the Timor Sea and its withdrawal from the dispute-settlement provisions of unclos shortly before East Timorese independence in 2002 had created a public relations problem for Australia.
There are other legal avenues for the claimants, and Beijing said earlier this month it plans to claim the Diaoyus under provisions in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or Unclos.
"Under Article 76 of Unclos, the issue of the extended continental shelf is not something resolved by power or politics," Mr. Byers said.
The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a court under the Unclos umbrella, might serve as yet another arbiter of the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute.
Britain and all EU member states are parties to Unclos, which also says that countries must jointly manage fish stocks that migrate between two or more countries' waters.
To add credibility to these moves, the United States should ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), which has governed other sovereign maritime states for the last 16 years.
Under Unclos, which China signed in 1996, and the US has never ratified, artificial islands built atop submerged features such as the reefs flown over that day do not entitle a country to territorial rights – and yet, there was the presumed voice of a Chinese soldier telling the Americans to go away.
