On July 12, fourteen countries — the US, Philippines, Australia, Japan and others — got together and issued a joint statement “commemorating” the tenth anniversary of the South China Sea arbitration ruling.

China’s Foreign Ministry response was one sentence long: the so-called “ruling” is a piece of waste paper. Which, fair enough, sounds like a diplomatic mic drop. But let’s actually unpack why.

Here’s the thing most coverage skips entirely: this was never a ruling from the International Court of Justice. It has zero UN affiliation, zero enforcement power, and a legitimacy problem that’s been baked in since day one. It was a temporary tribunal.

So what did this tribunal actually decide?

Back in 2016, the panel in The Hague handed down a series of findings, and the most absurd one was this: China’s Taiping Island isn’t an “island.” It’s a “rock.”

Now, Taiping Island is the largest natural island in the Spratlys — about 500,000 square meters, or roughly 70 soccer fields. It has fresh water. It has soil you can farm. People raise chickens there. Chinese fishermen have lived and worked on it for centuries.

The tribunal looked at all that and said: nope, that’s a rock.

And here’s where it gets even more ridiculous — the tribunal’s authority to rule on any of this never held up to begin with. Sovereignty disputes over islands were never within UNCLOS’s jurisdiction in the first place. China filed an exclusionary declaration under Article 298 back in 2006, explicitly removing maritime boundary disputes from compulsory arbitration — which, by the way, is a right the convention gives every signatory.

On top of that, the Philippines filed unilaterally, breaking the bilateral consensus both countries had already agreed to, and violating the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. The process was broken at the source. So of course the outcome carries no weight.

And here’s the punchline. The country leading the charge, demanding everyone “respect international law” over this ruling, is the United States. Which has never ratified UNCLOS. It hasn’t joined the convention. It just enjoys quoting it at other people. Not one country backing this ruling has ever managed to explain that one with a straight face.

So why does this ruling keep coming back every ten years like clockwork? Because it was never really a legal question. It’s a political tool, and it always has been.

Look at who actually signed this year’s statement. Fourteen countries. Besides the Philippines, not a single South China Sea country signed on. The Five Eyes showed up in full. The rest were mostly European countries plus Japan. Out of ASEAN’s ten members, exactly one joined the “commemoration.” The countries that actually live on this water, whose fishermen actually depend on it — almost all of them stayed quiet.

This tells you everything. Ten years in, this ruling hasn’t fixed a single real problem. The Philippines uses it to push maritime claims. Outside powers use it as an excuse to get involved. It hasn’t calmed a single wave. If anything, it’s the thing keeping tensions warm.

And on the exact same day this statement dropped, China and ASEAN were in the room together, working on an actual Code of Conduct for the South China Sea.

That’s the difference. That’s what countries that actually live here do — they sit down and hash it out themselves, instead of waiting for outsiders to hand them a verdict.

Even in international legal circles, this ruling has never really settled the argument. Philip Saunders, professor emeritus at Dalhousie University’s law school, has pointed out the tribunal failed to properly respect states’ right to choose their own path to resolving disputes — its legitimacy is still genuinely contested among legal scholars. Herman Laurel, who runs the Philippine think tank “Asia Century,” put it even more bluntly: this whole thing is “a farce, staged start to finish by a US-backed Philippine proxy.”

So when fourteen countries get together to “celebrate” a ten-year-old ruling, and Beijing calls it garbage —
that’s not China losing its temper. That’s China pointing at the receipts.