Cambodia notified Thailand and the United Nations secretary-general on June 2 that it had begun compulsory conciliation under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, appointing Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn as its agent and the Danish diplomat Peter Taksøe-Jensen and French academic Jean-Marc Thouvenin as its two conciliators. The notice started a 21-day clock for Thailand to name conciliators of its own. Within a day, Bangkok answered in three registers that do not line up.
Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, speaking at Government House after the cabinet meeting, said he had not been officially informed of the filing and saw no new problem. Asked whether the government needed to respond to Cambodia’s turn to international institutions, he replied, “Why do we need to counter it?” Asked whether Thailand was saying one thing in public and doing another behind the scenes, he answered, “Who sees it that way?” and said the position remained consistent. “Thailand still stands on its own principles, and there is no point at which the country has been put at a disadvantage,” he said.
The foreign ministry’s written statement the next day set a different tone. Thailand was “fully prepared to undertake all necessary actions in accordance with UNCLOS,” it read, and Sihasak Phuangketkeow, the deputy prime minister and foreign minister, was scheduled to meet the country’s legal counsel to finalise Thailand’s list of conciliators. The statement set out that the conciliation produces recommendations that are not legally binding, and called Cambodia’s “rushed decision” a step that could cause efforts to rebuild trust and restore bilateral relations to stall. Cambodia’s filing, it argued, stood in contradiction to Phnom Penh’s own calls for restoring those relations.
In an interview with The Nation that same day, Sihasak argued the mechanism should wait. “So why not try negotiations first?” he said, citing the conciliation between Timor-Leste and Australia as a reason to keep talking bilaterally before activating the panel. He said Cambodia’s move would weigh on relations, border security and any resumption of land-boundary talks, that Cambodia had “closed the door,” and that it “must be responsible for that decision.” Thailand, he said, was “ready” and not shaken.
The written submission ties Thailand to acting inside the convention and to naming its conciliators; the interview the same day argues the convention’s mechanism should give way to talks first. Both carry Sihasak’s voice. Readiness kept in reserve while preferring to negotiate is a coherent posture on its own. The statement readying the conciliators is also the one calling the filing premature, and the preparation, not the preference, enters the procedural record. Anutin, asked the same in plainer terms a day earlier, had declined to accept that any gap existed.
The precedent the minister raised against moving quickly is one Cambodia had already reached for. Taksøe-Jensen, the conciliator Phnom Penh named on June 2, chaired the commission that ran the Timor-Leste and Australia conciliation Sihasak cited. That case is the mechanism’s only prior use; Timor-Leste filed its notice in April 2016, and the two states signed a maritime boundary treaty in under two years.
Ten months earlier, the same caution had been entered inside Thailand’s own foreign ministry. The Nation reported in August 2025 that a serving assistant foreign minister, the former ambassador Ras Chaleechan, had warned against scrapping the 2000 and 2001 memorandums that framed the land and maritime talks. A unilateral cancellation might not hold under international law, he argued, because the agreements worked like treaties that required mutual consent to undo, and abandoning them would remove the only framework for negotiation. “If we cancel, it plays right into Cambodia’s hands,” he said. Holding the memorandums, even stalled, would let Thailand show the world Cambodia’s non-compliance, he added.
Thailand’s cabinet voted on May 5 to leave the 2001 memorandum, saying it had produced no progress in 25 years and that the country would treat UNCLOS as its reference framework instead. The conciliation route Cambodia invoked on June 2 became available once that framework was gone. The move Ras Chaleechan had warned would benefit Cambodia is the move that opened the door Cambodia walked through.
Cambodia set the procedure’s terms. It filed, named its agent and its conciliators, and started the clock. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet said the step was taken to “protect Cambodia’s sovereignty and maritime rights in accordance with international law.” The 26,000-square-kilometre overlapping claims area in the Gulf of Thailand holds an estimated 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and large oil deposits, valued at about US$300 billion, or more than 10 trillion baht, in a zone both countries claim. Thailand’s own energy ministry has put future revenues from the area at around the same figure.
Each side appoints two members to a five-person commission, and once four are seated they have 30 days to choose a chair; the commission then delivers non-binding recommendations in a report to the UN secretary-general. If Thailand does not name its conciliators within the 21 days, Phnom Penh can ask the secretary-general to appoint them in Bangkok’s place.
Thailand has resisted outside mechanisms before. Its stated preference, repeated across all three registers, is bilateral talks, and it has opposed routing disputes with Cambodia through international bodies, including the International Court of Justice. The two governments remain under a ceasefire in force since late December, reached after clashes along their 817-kilometre frontier last year left nearly 150 dead.
As of June 3, Thailand had not named its two conciliators. The clock Cambodia started on June 2 was running, against a Thai position that committed Bangkok to act within UNCLOS while arguing that the process it was readying for should give way to bilateral talks first.