Foreign ministers of Cambodia and Thailand delivered opening statements on Tuesday at the first meeting of a UN arbitration process to resolve a long-running maritime dispute between the two Southeast Asian neighbours.
Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn said his country was seeking a treaty with Thailand delimiting a single all-purpose maritime boundary in the Gulf of Thailand.
Cambodia has launched the compulsory conciliation process under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) over the long-running maritime dispute.
Sokhonn said Cambodia would alternatively be prepared to conclude an agreement with Thailand for the joint development and equitable sharing of resources between the two states.
Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow said the scope of the ongoing proceedings concerned only maritime boundary delimitation between Thailand and Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand.
“Thailand enters this conciliation in good faith, fully mindful of the provisions of UNCLOS,” Sihasak said. He noted that Bangkok had proposed direct talks on the maritime boundaries be held first before moving to the UNCLOS process.
The statements were delivered at a meeting in Singapore.
Cambodia and Thailand have both laid claim for more than 25 years to about 26,000 sq km of sea in the Gulf of Thailand.
The disputed area is estimated to contain nearly 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and large quantities of oil, with a value of about $300 billion.
The neighbours signed a pact in 2001 to develop a framework for jointly exploiting the energy resources in the so-called “overlapping claims area”. Thailand terminated the agreement in May, following deadly border clashes between the two countries last year.
In June, Cambodia announced it had launched a compulsory conciliation process under UNCLOS.
Under the mechanism, a panel of independent experts examines a dispute and makes recommendations, although its findings are not legally binding on either party.
The UN-backed mechanism has so far only been used by East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, to successfully resolve a decades-long maritime dispute with Australia.
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