Philippine coast guard drives a Vietnamese fishing boat out of Lawak Island waters in the Spratlys

The Philippine Coast Guard said it drove a Vietnamese-flagged fishing vessel out of the territorial sea around Lawak Island, in the Kalayaan Island Group of the Spratly Islands, on Friday 23 October. Coast guard personnel stationed on the island spotted the boat at about noon, roughly two nautical miles northeast of the island and well inside the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea, according to the coast guard's spokesman for the West Philippine Sea, Commodore Jay Tarriela.

Early in the afternoon the coast guard sent a rubber boat out from the island on a maritime patrol and law enforcement run. When the team reached the fishing vessel, it made repeated radio challenges and used a public address system to give spoken warnings ordering the crew to leave. The vessel then started its engine and headed north, away from the island. The coast guard team followed it at a safe distance, still issuing warnings, until it had left the territorial sea. The coast guard said there were no untoward incidents during the operation.

GMA News identified the boat as Vietnamese-flagged. The coast guard statement as reported by ABS-CBN News and the Philippine Daily Inquirer described it only as a foreign fishing vessel, and none of the reports gave its name or the size of its crew.

The coast guard said this was its sixth operation in less than four weeks to push foreign vessels away from islands in the Kalayaan group. The first involved the Chinese maritime militia vessel 9622 and its sampans, which were chased off from waters near Kota Island on 28 September and again on 9 October. Five foreign fishing vessels were then removed from Kota Island waters on 11 October.

The list also includes the Chinese fishing vessel Yuetaiyu 63168 and four small boats that were driven away from Lawak Island in mid-October, and another foreign fishing vessel that was sent away from Kota Island a few days later. ABS-CBN News and the Inquirer gave slightly different dates for those two cases, so TaiwanDefence has not fixed them to a single day.

The coast guard said Lawak Island is an integral part of the municipality of Kalayaan in Palawan province. It said that under international law the Philippines holds full sovereignty over its territorial sea, where no foreign vessel may fish without authorisation, and that such fishing also breaks Philippine law, naming the Philippine Fisheries Code and the Philippine Maritime Zones Act.

The run of cases shows the coast guard using personnel stationed on the islands themselves, working from boats as small as a rubber patrol craft, to enforce Manila's claims close to shore. It also shows that the pressure on those waters does not come from one flag alone. In the space of a month the coast guard has reported a Chinese militia ship, a Chinese fishing vessel with its small boats and now a Vietnamese fishing boat inside the territorial seas of islands it holds.