Point 4 of the 27 December 2025 Joint Statement covers going home only in areas within their own side. Point 6 carries the same limit. The same text sends the border itself to a joint commission to survey and mark.
Cambodia’s defence ministry took the Southeast Asian observer team to the O’Smach crossing at half past ten on the morning of 27 August 2026. Agence Kampuchea Presse, the state news wire, carried the ministry’s release in English the same day. It said Thai forces are occupying the crossing and that many Cambodian families cannot go home. It cited Point 4 of the statement the two sides signed on 27 December 2025.
Point 4 reads in full: Both sides agree to allow civilians residing in the affected border areas to return at the earliest, without obstruction and in safety and dignity, to their homes and normal livelihoods in areas within their own side.
The release carries the promise. It does not carry the six words that close it. Which of the two dropped them, the ministry in Khmer or the agency in English, the item does not show.
Cambodia and Thailand signed at a quarter to eleven in the morning, in two English originals, at the Prum and Ban Pak Kard crossing between Pailin and Chanthaburi. An observer sat in the room. The ceasefire took effect at noon. Thailand’s foreign ministry put the same signed text on its own site that day.
Which side is which is left to the Joint Boundary Commission. That is the joint body that surveys the border and marks it on the ground. Point 3 calls for that work to resume. The survey comes first and the markers follow. It calls the work immediate and gives it first and foremost priority in the affected border areas where the civilians resided. It says the arrangements run without prejudice to the border demarcation, so nothing done under them settles where the line goes. It also covers the safety of the survey team from landmines. Eight months have passed since the signing.
The people Point 4 covers are civilians who lived in the affected border areas. Cambodia says many of them near the crossing cannot get back. Their claim on Point 4 holds only if their homes stand on Cambodia’s side of a border nobody has yet marked. The text sets no date for their return. It says at the earliest.
Cambodia says shipping containers, barbed wire, trenches, bunkers and roads stand on that ground.
The release also says the commission should commence the survey. The signed text says resume. Cambodia’s foreign ministry spoke of resumption on 26 March 2026. The Prime Minister used the same word in Hanoi on 9 June 2026.
The release calls what Thai forces are doing at the crossing an illegal occupation. That is Cambodia’s word for it, in Cambodia’s own release. The text both sides signed says the arrangements under it settle nothing about the border.
Air Chief Marshal Prapas Sonjaidee directs Thailand’s Joint Information Centre, the standing body Thailand uses to speak on this dispute. Matichon reported his answers on 25 August 2026, two days before the visit. Thailand has no policy of using force to move a boundary line, he said. Its measures protect its own troops and civilians after fighting. Seeing containers, wire or structures proves those things are there, he said, and proves nothing about whose land it is. Observers do not decide a border. Cambodia should read the joint statement whole, he said, rather than lifting the part about civilians going home and leaving out safety, the position of forces and the difference over the border. Cambodia’s attempts to create new facts on the ground run against a text that requires both sides to hold where they stand, he said.
Point 2 keeps current deployments where they are. It bars any troop move, patrol included, towards the other side’s position. Point 6 bars entry to the other side’s air space, territory or positions as of ceasefire. Neither of those pins to the border. Point 6 then bars new fortifications beyond their own side. The clause on going home and that ban are limited the same way.
The Philippines took the chair of the observer team in February 2026. The Armed Forces of the Philippines says its own role in the team is strictly limited to observing, verifying and reporting on the ground. Whether Point 4 reaches the families beside the crossing turns on the survey and the markers that Point 3 puts first.