SEN. Rodante Marcoleta recently made the bold claim that we should “just give up” the Kalayaan Island Group, lamenting that it would be impossible to defend because it supposedly lies outside our exclusive economic zone (EEZ). That statement is not merely defeatist. It is conceptually wrong. To put it mildly, the senator is incorrect about what an EEZ is, about what national territory is and about what exactly he is proposing to surrender.
Kalayaan is not being defended because it is part of our EEZ. It is defended because it is part of our national territory. And that distinction is not semantic hair-splitting. It is the foundation of the law of the sea.
A simple comparison exposes the error. Hawaii is part of the United States even though it lies far beyond the 200-nautical-mile EEZ measured from the US mainland. No one argues that Hawaii’s status depends on EEZ arithmetic. It is part of US national territory, full stop. And precisely because it is national territory, it generates its own EEZ. The EEZ flows from territory; territory does not flow from the EEZ.
This is the core principle many pro-China commentators, and apparently some legislators, keep missing. An EEZ confers sovereign rights, not sovereignty. It allows a coastal state to explore and exploit natural resources in a maritime zone. It does not define territory. It does not create ownership of land.
Conflating EEZ rights with territorial sovereignty is a fatal category error. It is basic doctrine under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. So, when people argue that Kalayaan’s distance from Palawan or Luzon somehow negates its status as Philippine territory, they are not engaging in a sophisticated debate. They are revealing that they do not understand the most elementary distinction in maritime and territorial law.
At that point, the problem is no longer a disagreement. It is ignorance.
Kalayaan is not claimed on whim, proximity, or EEZ math. It is part of Philippine national territory for specific, defensible legal reasons grounded in international law. First, when the Philippines asserted its claim, there was no prior effective sovereign exercising continuous and exclusive authority over the relevant features. In territorial law, absence of effective control by another state matters.
Second, the Philippines made a formal, public and official assertion of sovereignty through Presidential Decree 1596 in 1978, incorporating the Kalayaan Island Group as a municipality of Palawan. That was not a press release or a rhetorical flourish. It was a sovereign act of the state, communicated to the international community.
Third, and this is decisive, the Philippines backed its claim with effectivités. International law does not reward armchair cartography. It looks for actual acts of sovereignty. The Philippines established and maintained a permanent military presence, civilian facilities, administrative acts and the exercise of jurisdiction over specific features. These are not symbolic gestures. They are the currency of territorial title.
Fourth, that state authority has been continuous and public. Philippine presence in Kalayaan has been open, sustained and maintained over extended periods. This is precisely what international law requires to perfect title over territory.
Fifth, recognition in international law is not a popularity contest. It looks at what states do, not who applauds. Continuous control matters more than diplomatic noise or rhetorical objections.
And finally, the 2016 arbitral ruling did not negate Philippine sovereignty over Kalayaan. The tribunal explicitly avoided questions of territorial sovereignty. It ruled on maritime entitlements, not land ownership. Philippine territorial claims over the Kalayaan Island Group were never invalidated, overturned or even adjudicated.
The bottom line is straightforward. Kalayaan is Philippine territory because the Philippines exercised sovereignty over it, not because it lies in an EEZ, not because it is “near” and not because of sentiment or nostalgia. That is doctrine. That is practice. That is law. If someone skips these steps, they are not debating. They are guessing.
This brings us to a related confusion that often fuels calls for surrender: the question of whether the Philippines has sovereignty over all the islands in the Kalayaan Island Group. Do we claim all of Kalayaan? Yes. Do we control all of it? No. And that distinction matters.
The Philippines formally claims the entire Kalayaan Island Group under Presidential Decree 1596. But in international law, sovereignty is not perfected by maps or decrees alone. It is perfected through effective occupation. In practice, the Philippines exercises actual, continuous state authority only over certain features such as Pag-asa and others. Other features are occupied by other states or remain contested.
This is not unusual. It is how territorial disputes actually work. Sovereignty is feature-specific, not all-or-nothing. Claim is not equal to control. And lack of control over some features does not mean abandonment of the claim, nor does it strip the features we do control of their status as Philippine territory.
To collapse these distinctions is not to simplify the issue. It is to misunderstand it. Worse, it creates the illusion that surrender is somehow pragmatic or legally inevitable.
When Senator Marcoleta suggests that we “give up” Kalayaan because it is not part of our EEZ, he is not merely proposing to relinquish sovereign rights over maritime resources. He is proposing to abandon sovereignty over a part of our national territory. That is a radically different, and far more serious, assertion.
Courage in matters of sovereignty does not mean recklessness. It means clarity. It means knowing what is ours, why it is ours and what is at stake when we are told to walk away. In Kalayaan, what is being suggested is not a technical adjustment of maritime entitlements. It is the surrender of territory that the Philippine state has formally claimed, effectively occupied and continuously administered.
To call this “realism” is to mistake fear for prudence and confusion for wisdom. That is not prudence. That is abdication. And no amount of EEZ confusion can disguise what it truly is.
Antonio P. Contreras, PhD, is a professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and vice chairman of the board of the state-run PTV Network Inc. The views expressed here are his own.
