# Treaty of Washington (1900)

The Treaty of Washington of 1900 was signed in Washington, D.C., on November 7, 1900, and came into effect on March 23, 1901, when the ratifications were exchanged. The treaty sought to remove any ground of misunderstanding growing out of the interpretation of Article III of the 1898 Treaty of Paris by clarifying specifics of territories relinquished to the United States by Spain. It explicitly provided:
   Spain relinquishes to the United States all title and claim of title, which she may have had at the time of the conclusion of the Treaty of Peace of Paris, to any and all islands belonging to the Philippine Archipelago, lying outside the lines described in Article III of that Treaty and particularly to the islands of Cagayan [Mapun], Sulu and Sibutu and their dependencies, and agrees that all such islands shall be comprehended in the cession of the Archipelago as fully as if they had been expressly included within those lines.
In consideration for that explicit statement of relinquishment, the United States agreed to pay to Spain the sum of one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) within six months after the exchange of ratification. The Treaty of Washington is also known as the Cession Treaty.
Both the 1898 and 1900 treaties were incorporated in the first article of the 1935 Constitution of the Philippines concerning the scope of the national territory.

## Use in territorial disputes
### South China Sea islands

The baselines of the Philippines were published by the Philippine government, the Scarborough Shoal and Spratly Islands were not included within the Philippine Archipelago. in 2015, Director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office Wang Yi claimed in an East Asia Summit and an ASEAN Regional Forum Foreign Ministers’ Meetings that according to the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the Treaty of Washington in 1900 and the Convention Between the United States and Great Britain of 1930 which defined the territory of the Philippines, the Scarborough Shoal and Spratly Islands are not Philippines' territory.
According Antonio Carpio, a former Philippine Associate Justice, the 1900 treaty amended the 1898 Treaty of Paris by including several islands outside of the bounds of the 1898 treaty still under Spanish possession at the time citing three maps published during the Spanish colonial era which included the two disputed areas as part of the Philippine territory. According to Carpio, by submitting a position paper recognizing the 1900 Treaty of Washington during the arbitration filed by the Philippines, China may have inadvertently supported the Philippine position by making a judicial admission (under the law, the highest form of admission) that Philippine territory is regulated by the Treaty of Washington and Spain also ceded to the United States "any and all islands belonging to the Philippine archipelago, lying outside the lines of the Treaty of Paris". China's 2014 position paper said that under these treaties, Philippine territory was "confined to the Philippine Islands, having nothing to do with any of China's maritime features in the South China Sea".

### Batanes

A 2007 Taipei Times editorial by Prof. Chen Hurng-yu of Tamkang University triggered a minor dispute between the Philippines and Taiwan. Chen claimed that Taiwan has territorial claims over the province of Batanes, insisting that the island province lies outside the limits of the 1900 treaty, in contradiction to the viewpoints of Philippine political scholars that the province was covered in the 1900 treaty.