The United States Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Halsey patrolled near the South China Sea’s Paracel Islands in May 2024 to assert navigational rights and freedoms under international law. The operation took place despite the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) unsupported claims that the maritime region is its territory and that foreign vessels must receive transit permission from Beijing.
The PRC’s assertions are among 29 maritime claims from 17 states worldwide that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) deems excessive and has challenged, according to its recently released Freedom of Navigation Report for Fiscal Year 2023. About half the claims are from Indo-Pacific nations and states. Five PRC claims — the most for a single state — are challenged repeatedly.
The USS Halsey reinforced the DOD challenges by conducting an innocent passage off the Paracel archipelago in compliance with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea’s (UNCLOS) provisions on freedoms of navigation and overflight, free trade, and unimpeded commerce. “No member of the international community should be intimidated or coerced into giving up their rights and freedoms,” the U.S. Navy stated after the destroyer’s mission.
Specifically, the Freedom of Navigation Report challenges the PRC’s 1996 declaration of straight baselines around the disputed Paracels, which violates international law reflected in Article 7 of UNCLOS and increases the size of the PRC’s illegal maritime claim, the U.S. Navy stated.
Under certain circumstances, states can use straight baselines drawn along parts of their coast to measure their territorial sea. The PRC, Taiwan and Vietnam each claims sovereign rights to the Paracels.
UNCLOS also prohibits states from demanding notification or permission for other states’ innocent passage, according to the report.
The report chronicles DOD challenges of excessive maritime claims between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2023. Calling attention to invalid claims prevents them from becoming accepted international law, the department stated.
“Unlawful and sweeping excessive maritime claims — or incoherent legal theories of maritime entitlement — pose a threat to the legal foundation of the rules-based international order,” the annual report states.
DOD operations such as the USS Halsey mission are “planned with deliberation, subjected to legal review, and professionally conducted,” the report states. “DOD’s actions reinforce international law in an even-handed, principled manner with no intent to be provocative.”
The challenges do not target any single claimant; nor are they rendered in response to current events.
U.S. forces operate routinely in the South China Sea, often with Allies and Partners. Such missions demonstrate that UNCLOS adherents will sail and fly where international law allows, the U.S. Navy stated.
The U.S. launched its Freedom of Navigation Program in 1979 and has vowed to keep defending rights and freedoms of the sea as long as nations misinterpret or seek to defy UNCLOS provisions.
