Pax Silica agreement to include clause affirming PH sovereignty - GMA Network

Philippine officials are expected to include a clause that explicitly preserves sovereignty over projects in the Pax Silica initiative in New Clark City, stating that expatriates employed in the area will have no diplomatic immunity.

According to Trade Undersecretary Ceferino Rodolfo, maintaining sovereignty will be included in the governance framework for the Pax Silica industrial hub, which is expected to be signed in November.

“It can be stated. It will be stated,” Rodolfo told reporters at a briefing in Taguig City on Monday.

“The Clark Advanced Manufacturing Park project will remain to be Philippine sovereign territory. There will be no diplomatic immunity or carve-out of any kind,” he said.

Rodolfo said discussions on diplomatic immunity were only in passing as part of possible measures to entice investors to set up shop in the Philippines, and were removed from the table early in negotiations.

READ: What is Pax Silica and why are people worried?

“It’s not as if we were negotiating and they said ‘We want this, we want this,’ and we said ‘No, you cannot have that,’ It’s in the context of a joint discussion of what will it take to bring in the investors,” he said.

“It’s one of the possibilities that was discussed, but that was very quickly - we moved very quickly from that. That’s why I’m a bit surprised that many of the initial apprehensions about this revolved around that when it was very early on, really a non-issue already,” he added.

The Philippines and the United States are set to establish a 4,000-acre industrial hub in the Luzon Economic Corridor (LEC), designated as an Economic Security Zone, serving as a new model for AI-native investment hubs under the Pax Silica initiative.

The initiative, announced in April, is a US-led effort to build a network of allied supply chains for critical technologies and minerals, which the Philippines will host in the New Clark City in Tarlac.

The master agreement is expected to be signed in November, under which the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) will lease out 1,620 hectares of land.

“With the US in particular, we are negotiating the master lease agreement between the BCDA as owner of the 1,620-hectare land, and the US government,” Rodolfo said.

Officials on Monday also clarified that there will be no data centers included in the Pax Silica initiative, as its main objective is to process the country’s minerals and to make high-tech components for AI and semiconductors.

It will house the Clark Advanced Manufacturing Plant (CAMP), with an initial $10-billion investment target to kickstart short-term site development and initial facility construction. It is also expected to generate up to 150,000 direct high-value jobs, some 50,000 construction jobs, and up to 800,000 indirect jobs. — RSJ, GMA News