CEBU CITY: The Philippines is tapping into its diverse culinary heritage to attract visitors, especially from Gulf Cooperation Council countries, its tourism chief said, as the country hosted the UN’s first regional forum on food travel.

The conference in Cebu was held in conjunction with the UN Tourism’s annual joint meeting of the Commission for East Asia and the Pacific, and the Commission for South Asia.
Co-organized by the Philippine government, the forum focused on policies to advance the culinary tourism of the Asia-Pacific region.
“We greatly value the opportunity to expand Philippine tourism to the Middle Eastern market, especially by way of our Filipino flavors,” Tourism Secretary Christina Frasco told Arab News on the sidelines of the UN meetings on Friday.
She added that tourism arrivals from GCC countries had more than recovered following the global pandemic.
The COVID-19 outbreak dealt a major blow to the Philippine tourism industry — a main contributor to the economy — but after shutdowns in 2020 and 2021, it is back on track, and is forecast to soon meet its pre-pandemic level of 8.26 million visitor arrivals in 2019.
Part of the strategy to revive the sector was expanding the country’s halal tourism portfolio, which last month — for a second consecutive time — won the Philippines the Emerging Muslim-friendly non-Organization of Islamic Cooperation Destination award at the annual Halal in Travel Global Summit in Singapore.
The predominantly Catholic country, where Muslims constitute about 10 percent of the nearly 120 million population, has welcomed more than 2 million international travelers since the beginning of the year, with a 10 percent increase, compared with last year, in the number of visitors arriving from GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are among the Philippine government’s key emerging-market targets.
“We relish the opportunity to welcome our Middle Eastern friends to the country and we are now presently working on strategic partnerships,” Frasco said.
“We also possess tourism products that are quite attractive to the Middle Eastern market, especially in terms of our leisure tourism products, our sand and beach, our diving, as well as our luxury tourism destinations, and our health and wellness and medical tourism portfolio.”
As the Philippines hosted the UN Tourism Regional Forum on Gastronomy Tourism for Asia and the Pacific, its latest focus is food tourism — a burgeoning trend in the Middle East, where travelers seek authentic culinary experiences.
With about 2 million Filipinos living and working in the region, Philippine stakeholders understand their requirements.
“Our very talented Filipino chefs and support crew populate many kitchens all over the world as well as many tourism establishments, including those in the Middle East,” Frasco said.
“We hope to be able to fully open up opportunities for Filipino flavors to be known to the world especially.”

LONDON: A UK submission of arguments at the international criminal court could delay a decision on the issuance of arrest warrants against the Israeli prime minister and defense minister for alleged war crimes in Gaza.

Judges at the ICC ruled on Thursday that the British government was allowed to submit legal arguments to judges mulling prosecutor Karim Khan’s request issued in May for arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

Court documents made public on Thursday showed that UK, as an ICC member state, filed a request with the court earlier this month to provide written observations on whether “the court can exercise jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, in circumstances where Palestine cannot exercise criminal jurisdiction over Israeli nationals (under) the Oslo Accords.”

The court already has an ongoing investigation, launched in 2021, into any alleged crimes within its jurisdiction committed on Palestinian territory and by Palestinians on the territory of Israel.

In the same year, judges ruled that the court did have jurisdiction after the Palestinian authorities signed up to the court in 2015, after being granted United Nations observer state status.

The decision, however, left a ruling on the interpretation of the 1993 Oslo Accords regarding Palestinian jurisdiction over Israeli nationals for a later stage in the proceedings.

The British argument is that the Palestinian authorities cannot have jurisdiction over Israeli nationals under the accords, and so it cannot transfer that jurisdiction over to the ICC to prosecute Israelis.

Experts told the Guardian newspaper on Friday that the decision to allow the UK to intervene on this issue might delay the arrest warrants case, though a former ICC official familiar with the 2021 case said the jurisdictional issues had been resolved and, if challenged, would be “dead on arrival.”

Mark Kersten, an ICC expert and criminal justice professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in Canada, said “it would beggar belief” if judges ruled Palestine “could not ask the court to address atrocities committed on its territories because of a moribund Oslo peace process.”

Danya Chaikel, an International Federation for Human Rights’ representative at the ICC, said Britain’s attempt to challenge ICC jurisdiction citing the Oslo accords was “deeply troubling and unjust.”

Clive Baldwin, a senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, also said the UK should not be “leading the charge for double standards in victims’ access to justice.”

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said: “The UK believes that the court has not yet engaged with the impact and effect of the Oslo accords on jurisdiction in this case and we think it is imperative that they do so at any early stage of proceedings.”

* With Reuters