Case Note: The South China Sea Dispute and the Role of UNCLOS in the Settlement of the Dispute
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the summer of 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in the Hague ruled on a territorial dispute between the Philippines and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the South China Sea (SCS). In brief, the PCA found the claims of the PRC over most areas of the South China Sea illegitimate and therefore did not recognize the PRC’s claim of territoriality over these waters. In this case note, I explore the details of this PCA case, through a close analysis of the relevant case documents. I conclude the note by looking at different precedents set by this particular case. To do so, I also briefly turn attention to the relevant legal concepts of maritime law and the mechanisms for maritime dispute settlement, provided for in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). In doing so, I identify how these legal concepts come into play in this particular case and explore its possible implications on future cases of maritime dispute settlement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".