Jaime Yambao
DURING a stop recently at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu on his way home from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced that the Philippines would be working on a Code of Conduct (COC) with Asean countries that would be separate from the COC that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) has been negotiating with China for two decades.
A reason given for the decision is the long time that negotiations of the Asean-China COC have been taking. That period has set the record for the gestation of treaties in diplomatic history. Last July, the Asean foreign ministers and their counterparts in China decided to accelerate the COC process and set 2026, or three years after, as the deadline for the conclusion of the COC. But few are optimistic that the COC, much less a substantive and effective one, would be realized even by that time.
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