"Persona non grata"

Who is more of a persona non grata, the Chinese ambassador who is only doing his job to defend and uphold his government's interests, or the two senators and seven of their allies who are betraying the trust of the Filipino people by proposing to surrender the Kalayaan Island Group to China?

- Atty. Josephus B. Jimenez

In ordinary parlance, a person may be blacklisted by a locality as a highly-undesirable visitor and may be ostracized by a group of citizens or local government for being offensive, ungrateful, and notoriously obnoxious. In international law, any sovereign state may declare any alien as persona non grata in order to express its outrage at what that undesirable alien represents or has manifested.

There was a strong clamor to declare the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines as persona non grata. But the president stood firm that we need to exercise utmost restraint in order to preserve our highly-delicate diplomatic relations with the Peoples' Republic of China. The current standoff in the West Philippine Sea, and the Philippines’ many acts and pronouncements against Beijing and in favor of Washington, D.C. and Taiwan are a "de facto” strain in such highly-sensitive foreign relations.