Four documents were signed on 11 September. None has been published, and neither side has recorded a step towards bringing any into force. The armed-forces framework both sides announced is not among them.
Min Aung Hlaing spent 11 and 12 September in Cambodia on what Phnom Penh called a State Visit. The King, Norodom Sihamoni, had invited him. Diplomats rank a State Visit above an Official Visit, which is what a working trip gets.
Cambodia’s state news agency set out the days. A wreath-laying, a summit with Hun Sen, who stands in as head of state while the King is abroad, then a state banquet. Min Aung Hlaing talked with Prime Minister Hun Manet at the Peace Palace, met Khuon Sudary, who presides over the National Assembly, and went to Angkor Wat.
The two sides signed four documents on the first day, with Hun Manet and Min Aung Hlaing watching. Three are between the two states: one on investment, one to stop both countries taxing the same income twice, and a memorandum on media. The fourth is narrower, and amends a cultural deal between Cambodia’s culture ministry and Myanmar’s.
Nobody has published any of the four, and neither side has recorded a step towards bringing them into force. Signing settles the wording. Ratifying is what each country then does at home, and only after that does a text start to bite.
The investment deal looks like the first the two countries have ever had, and that word matters. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development keeps the standard register. Its Myanmar page lists twelve such treaties, among them Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines. Cambodia is not there. The register also shows nothing signed anywhere in 2026, and it says governments report to it voluntarily. A gap on that table proves nothing.
A treaty like this lets a firm from one country claim legal cover in the other, and usually lets it sue the host state. Both already sit inside the ASEAN Comprehensive Investment Agreement, in force since 24 February 2012, which gives firms a floor of cover across the bloc. What the new text adds on top is in the text, and the text is not out.
The two sides also agreed to share military experience, train each other’s people, and build a formal framework linking the two armed forces. That framework is not one of the four. Cambodia’s foreign ministry does not identify it, and neither does the later account from its defence ministry. No title, no signatory, no body named as competent to conclude it, no scope, no date when it would start to bind.
Min Aung Hlaing holds the office of president. The Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, Myanmar’s national legislature, elected him in April 2026 and he swore the oath on the tenth. Agence France-Presse reported that the election behind that legislature shut out Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and could not run across large areas held by armed opponents.
Since 27 November 2024 the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has been asking the judges to order his arrest, over the deportation and persecution of the Rohingya. The court’s case page still lists the request as pending before Pre-Trial Chamber I, and no warrant has been announced. Since November 2025 the court keeps requests like this, and the rulings on them, secret unless the judges say otherwise. Cambodia belongs to the court. What obliges a member to arrest somebody is a warrant, not a request.
He has been travelling. Vietnam had him from 4 to 6 September, a week before Phnom Penh. Thailand had him five weeks earlier, on an Official Visit, the lower rank. Cambodia has been doing this for a while. Hun Sen flew to Naypyidaw on 7 and 8 January 2022, as prime minister and ASEAN chair, the first head of government to go after the coup. By Min Aung Hlaing’s own account he had not been to Cambodia since 2017.
ASEAN’s restriction sits in paragraph 23 of the leaders’ decision of 26 October 2025. Myanmar may send officials but not ministers or its leader to two kinds of meeting, ASEAN Summits and ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meetings. That holds until Myanmar makes meaningful progress on the Five-Point Consensus, the plan the bloc agreed in 2021 to stop the fighting and start talks. Paragraph 23 names those two bodies and no others. The text says nothing about how members deal with Myanmar on their own.
Chea Thyrith, the Senate spokesman, said on 11 September that Cambodia does not interfere in another state’s internal affairs. Min Aung Hlaing said Cambodia had backed Myanmar inside ASEAN. He singled out its 2022 chairmanship.
At the Peace Palace the two leaders said they would work harder together against human trafficking, drug trafficking and cybercrime. Paragraph 27 of the same text asks members to cooperate against crimes coming out of Myanmar’s war. Its list runs through human trafficking, drugs trafficking, displacement, cyber threats, online scams and other security risks. Sharing a subject with that paragraph is not the same as working to it.
The anti-scam promise has a date. The foreign ministry says Myanmar will attend the International Conference on Combating Online Scams, which Cambodia holds in Phnom Penh on 23 and 24 September, with Hun Manet opening it. Two bodies co-sponsor: the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s regional office, and the Lancang-Mekong Integrated Law Enforcement and Security Cooperation Centre.
Khuon Sudary welcomed all four and asked that they be turned into something both peoples can feel. Nobody has published them, so nobody outside the two states can weigh that yet. What happens in public is that meeting, on 23 September.
