South China Sea islands Antonio Carpio, a former Philippine
associate justice, stated in 2024 that the 1900 treaty amended the 1898 Treaty of Paris by including several islands outside of the bounds of the 1898 treaty still under Spanish possession at the time, citing three maps published during the Spanish colonial era which included the two disputed areas as part of the Philippine territory. According to Carpio, by submitting a position paper recognizing the 1900 Treaty of Washington during the arbitration filed by the Philippines, China may have inadvertently supported the Philippine position by making a judicial admission (under the law, the highest form of admission) that Philippine territory is regulated by the Treaty of Washington and Spain also ceded to the United States "any and all islands belonging to the Philippine archipelago, lying outside the lines of the Treaty of Paris". The
Spratly Islands, part of which are designated as the
Kalayaan Island Group, were incorporated into Philippine law through Presidential Decree No. 1596 in 1978, and are treated, together with
Scarborough Shoal, as a "regime of islands" under the
baselines of the Philippines established by Republic Act No. 9522 (2009). In 2015, Director of the
Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office
Wang Yi claimed in an
East Asia Summit and an ASEAN Regional Forum Foreign Ministers' Meetings that according to the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the Treaty of Washington in 1900, and the Convention Between the United States and Great Britain of 1930 which defined the territory of the Philippines, Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands are not Philippine territory. Several of the islands and atolls within the area covered by the 1900 treaty are the subject of
territorial disputes involving countries other than the Philippines and China. Two examples are
Sand Cay and
Southwest Cay, both claimed by
Vietnam.
Batanes A 2007
Taipei Times editorial by Prof. Chen Hurng-yu of
Tamkang University triggered a minor dispute between the Philippines and Taiwan. Chen claimed that Taiwan has territorial claims over the province of
Batanes, insisting that the island province lies outside the limits of the 1900 treaty, in contradiction to the viewpoints of Philippine political scholars that the province was covered in the 1900 treaty. ==See also==