Singapore activities on island irrelevant: KL

It says island 'has been part of Johor Sultanate since 16th century'
The Straits Times, November 14, 2007
By Lydia Lim, Senior Political Correspondent


THE HAGUE (NETHERLANDS) - MALAYSIA yesterday urged an international court to reject as irrelevant all Singapore has done on Pedra Branca since 1851 to show it exercised state authority over the disputed island.

Its international counsel, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, argued that it was Johor, not Singapore, that has had title or sovereignty over the island.

Therefore, Singapore could not 'confirm and maintain' its title to the island through activities, as it had claimed, since it had no such title to begin with, Sir Elihu told the International Court of Justice.

'Just as we are taught in school...that when zero is multiplied by any number whatsoever, the result is always zero, so a title that does not exist cannot be confirmed and maintained by any amount of subsequent State action,' Sir Elihu argued.

Singapore's stand is that Pedra Branca was a remote and uninhabited island that belonged to no one when the British took legal possession of it in 1847 in order to build a lighthouse there.

After the lighthouse was completed in 1851, the British crown and later Singapore confirmed and maintained their title to the island through a range of activities which included naval patrols and the control of access to the island, it said.

These activities, it argued last week, amounted to an open, continuous and effective display of state authority over Pedra Branca, against which Malaysia failed to protest.

Yesterday, Malaysia sought to brush aside all these activities in one sweep by deeming them irrelevant.

Sir Elihu told the court that the issue of sovereignty boiled down to whether Pedra Branca was terra nullius in 1847, as was claimed by Singapore.

The Latin phrase means no man's land or belonging to no one.

Both he and Malaysia's Ambassador to the Netherlands, Datuk Noor Farida Ariffin, mounted arguments to back Malaysia's claim that Pedra Branca had never been terra nullius because it had always been part of the old Johor Sultanate dating back to the 16th century.

Datuk Noor Farida, a lawyer, described the geographical extent of what she termed its large maritime empire.

'The extensive reach of the old Sultanate of Johor is recorded in the Malay annals and confirmed in all 18th- and early 19th-century descriptions,' she said.

She then went on to describe its territory as extending all the way north to the Natunas islands in the South China Sea, and all the way south to the islands in the Riau-Lingga archipelago, and covering all the islands in the Singapore Strait including Pulau Batu Puteh, Malaysia's name for Pedra Branca.

She also stressed Pedra Branca's closeness to the Malaysian peninsula by flashing on a screen a photograph of the disputed island with Johor's hills in the background.

Last week, Singapore said Malaysia's claim that Pedra Branca was part of the old Johor sultanate was vague and not backed by historical evidence. It also argued that the boundaries of a traditional South-east Asian kingdom were based on who the people in an area paid allegiance to, rather than on clear territorial limits.

It also highlighted that the physical proximity of a disputed territory to a claimant state was not considered to be a valid point in international law.

Yesterday, Sir Elihu also quoted from eight documents, which he said provided 'conclusive' proof that Pedra Branca had belonged to Johor.

These included two letters by the British Resident in Singapore John Crawfurd which, Sir Elihu said, described the Johor Sultanate as including all the islands in the China Sea 'as far as the Natunas'.

However, Singapore had pointed out that none of those documents referred to Pedra Branca by name, except for a newspaper article in the Singapore Free Press, which its counsel had shown to be unreliable.