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to participants in the Peace Conference and there is no record that we objected to them.
In 1956 we further weakened our claim by failing to take an obvious opportunity of displaying our sovereignty when we were asked for assistance in transporting a geologist of the Shell Company of Borneo to Spratly Island. We protested in 1971 at the Vietnamese claim to the islands this time in terms which if we had had sovereignty would have been adequate. But although this is clear evidence that we have not acknowledged the claims of South Vietnam it cannot in all the circumstances be regarded as having had the slightest effect on our own claim which had been extinct for many years. Indeed the last sentence of what a member of South-East Asia Department' told the Vietnamese Embassy: "HMG have never acknowledged the various claims that have been made since this date by other countries' is open to question. Internally at any rate we had clearly acknowledged the French claim, and we had by acquiescing in it lost any faint prospect of success' that we had in the 1930s in regard to the claim. Moreover we seem to have said to Parliament in 1939, at the time of the Japanese annexation, that the islands belong to France.
Vietnam
South Vietnam has certainly shown an intention to occupy the Spratly Islands, and some recent acts of effective administration have been performed by her. But on the evidence in the Memorandum I do not think that in the presence of competing claims she could establish title. Paragraph 23 is rather thin on important facts - for example the date of the occupation which was reported in the Annals of Vietnam. Presumably the islands were shown on Vietnamese maps as belonging to Vietnam again the Memorandum does not make this clear. The weakness of the claim is that occupation during the nineteenth century was not followed up by effective administration, exploitation or any other act of sovereignty. The acts relied on to show effective occupation were later carried out by France. It is quite clear that France was not acting on behalf of Vietnam in carrying out her occupation during the 1930s and this is underlined by the fact that although France has ceded her rights in respect of the Paracels to Vietnam she has not done this in regard to the Spratly Islands. I therefore do not think that her claim could stand up against a rival claim by France.
France and China
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These two States are undoubtedly the front runners. The evidence in the Memorandum is not sufficient to enable me to say whether either one of them could today succeed in establishing title to the seven islands which we regard as capable of appropriation by a sovereign State. But we are now informed from the Embassy in Paris that the French have informed us privately that they regard their claim as having lapsed.
According to US sources China's claim to the islands dates back to the fifteenth century. Her case is that the maps prepared by China have for centuries shown the Spratly Islands (along with other islands in the South China Sea) as belonging to China, and that they have since time immemorial been visited annually by Chinese fishermen who have lived on the islands at times for the purpose of fishing in the surrounding waters. Our own Colonial Office List confirms this claim by stating (from 1891 onwards) that
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