ABSTRACT
July 12, 2016, became one of the significant dates for geo-politics due to the reverberations it caused. That day, the judgement by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) unanimously declared in its award that there was “no legal basis for China to claim historic rights” over the Nine Dash Line (NDL) as there was no evidence that China had historically exercised exclusive control over the water and resources of the South China Sea (SCS). China, which did not become a party to the case since its inception in 2014, disregarded the judgement which finally went in favour of the Philippines – the other party in the dispute. The judgement became debatable amongst academics, practitioners and policy-makers from various fields who examined the award and its further implications on the issue of the SCS. Besides the technical aspects of maritime sovereignty claims by China in the NDL region, the judgement has other geo-strategic, economic and security implications for decades to come.
