Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
BY the criteria of international law, particularly the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Obligations of States, we were not an independent and sovereign state on June 12, 1898. While the Treaty of Paris by which Spain ceded the Philippines, albeit reluctantly, to the United States was signed in December of that year, an August Protocol had made clear that the US was to "hold" the Philippines until it was decided what to do with us. And in the conference of October 1898, the US President made clear that the Philippines was going to be part of the spoils of war!
I remember that when we were very young children, we celebrated Independence Day on July 4, the day the Philippines became a member of the community of states — attaining full international legal personality and recognized as such by other nations. This does nothing to detract from the significance of the June 12 Declaration of Independence, but to argue that on that day, we became a sovereign state is to tread on very thin ice.
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