SINGAPORE – 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.

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Having launched the compulsory conciliation process under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Cambodian Foreign and International Cooperation Minister Prak Sokhonn said his country was seeking a treaty with Thailand delimiting a single all-purpose maritime boundary, adding that in the alternative Cambodia would be prepared to conclude an agreement with Thailand for the joint development and equitable sharing of resources between the two states.

In his statement, 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. He stated that Thailand enters this conciliation in good faith, fully mindful of the provisions of UNCLOS, noting that Bangkok had proposed direct talks on the maritime boundaries be held first before moving to the UNCLOS process.

For more than 25 years, Cambodia and Thailand have both laid claim to about 26,000 square kilometres of sea in the Gulf of Thailand, an area estimated to hold nearly 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and large quantities of oil with a value of about 300 billion dollars.

The neighbours signed a pact in 2001 to develop a framework to jointly exploit the energy resources in the so-called overlapping claims area, but Thailand terminated the agreement in May, a fallout of deadly border clashes last year. In June, Cambodia announced it had launched a compulsory conciliation process under UNCLOS, where a panel of independent experts examines a dispute and makes recommendations, although its findings are not legally binding on either party.

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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.

-Thailand News (TN)