Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. said on Tuesday he had proposed with his Chinese counterpart a template in the ongoing joint negotiation to exploit oil and gas in the contested waters of the South China Sea (SCS). He said the template will govern how he and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) will decide whether any specific project by any other department follows the law, the Constitution, and the Philippines’s rights under the 2016 arbitral award. “It says best effort for one year, but it can go on forever until one party or the other gets rid of it, [and] says ‘No, we don’t want it anymore’ so it would continue,” Locsin told CNN Philippines’s The Source host, Pinky Webb.

Mercene, R. (2020, November 4). Locsin, Wang eye 'template' in talks on oil, gas in SCS. Business Mirror, pp. A8, A2.