Manila, Sept. 8 -- The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) guarantees the Philippines' "solidary territorial entity," Department of National Defense (DND) Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said on Tuesday.

"UNCLOS is fundamentally important to the Republic of the Philippines because we are one of the five archipelagic states in the world. And our existence as a solidary territorial entity in the world is guaranteed by UNCLOS, of which we fought for," he said during his address at this year's Seoul Defense Dialogue (SDD) in South Korea.

"Yet, the battle of narratives and the battle of friction continues daily in the Republic of the Philippines and in ASEAN, for that matter, because of an assertion of a fabulist concocti...