An international arbitration tribunal has ruled that it has jurisdiction to consider issues in dispute between the Philippines and China regarding territorial claims in the South China Sea. The decision is a defeat for Beijing, which has insisted that it will not submit to international adjudication of its claims and, alternatively, that the issues in question cannot be considered by the tribunal. This is no time to celebrate, however: the decision is preliminary, addressing procedural issues, and does not deal with the substance of the matter. More significantly, Beijing could reject the tribunal's findings. That would be a mistake, but that does not seem to much trouble Chinese leaders these days.

China claims that it has sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea. That claim is challenged by five other governments — Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam — and efforts to resolve the disputes have failed. Absent a peaceful resolution of this situation, the claimants have gone about creating "facts on the ground" by seizing islands and rocks, building structures on top of them — frequently with military personnel — to bolster their claims to parts of the sea. International law generally holds that such structures do not change the status of such a "feature"; in other words, a government cannot create a land feature in water and then claim adjacent waters. Either the claim exists in nature — before a government intervenes, or not at all.

Frustrated with the slow pace of negotiations, the government of the Philippines in January 2013 filed a claim with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague to force China's hand. Manila made 15 submissions to the tribunal, asking for resolution of questions ranging from whether certain features can be considered islands (and thus creating rights to adjacent waters) to whether China has interfered with Philippine fishing activities near Scarborough Shoal. The panel agreed to hear seven of the 15 submissions under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).