China enacts Land Borders Law to accelerate expansionism, violate international law: report

Citing the recent Land Borders Law enacted by Beijing, China is using domestic law to violate international law and indulge in expansionism with the aim of asserting its own claims and rights in the region including the South China Sea, said a media report.

Writing in Nikkei Asia, Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist and author of nine books, said that the Land Borders Law is just the latest example of how an increasingly aggressive China is using domestic law to underpin its expansionism.

"Beijing, for example, used a new national security law to crush Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement and bring the city into political lockstep with the Chinese Communist Party in breach of China's United Nations-registered treaty with Britain," Chellaney said.

The Land Borders Law came just months after China's new Coast Guard Law took effect. Several countries, including Japan, the United States, the Philippines and Vietnam, have raised concerns about the Coast Guard Law, which clearly violates the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

In an opinion piece, Chellaney said that just as the Coast Guard Law is aimed at accelerating China's maritime militarization, the Land Borders Law will speed up its militarization of the Himalayas. And just as the Coast Guard Law authorizes the use of lethal force in disputed waters claimed by China, the land law permits the use of force in defending and furthering Chinese claims to contested lands.

Simply put, Beijing enacts domestic law to violate international law. China's success in unraveling Hong Kong's autonomy through a national security law could inspire it to enact Taiwan-specific legislation or activate its 2005 Anti-Secession Law against that island democracy, he said.

"By employing domestic law as a cover for unlawful actions, China illustrates that international law is powerless against the powerful, especially scofflaw states. But China's expansionism often breaches international law with the aim, ironically, of asserting its own claims and rights under international law," he said.

Examples include China's human-made militarized islands in the South China Sea and its current militarized village-building spree in disputed Himalayan borderlands in order to extend or consolidate its control over strategically important areas that India, Bhutan and Nepal maintain fall within their national boundaries, Chellaney said.

( With inputs from ANI )