The second thing Cambodia asked for is the one Thailand’s wording leaves out.
The five people hearing the Cambodia-Thailand sea dispute met the two sides for the first time this week, in Singapore. The meeting runs from 14 to 16 September. On 15 September the two Agents spoke in public, and each said what he takes the case to be for. The two accounts do not meet.
Conciliation is not a court. This panel hears both sides and writes a report, and that report binds nobody. Cambodia started the procedure on its own, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which lets one state begin it without the other agreeing. Thailand is taking part. What the two are arguing over is a stretch of the Gulf of Thailand where their claims overlap.
Thailand’s Agent is Sihasak Phuangketkeow, its Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. An Agent is the person a state appoints to speak for it in a proceeding of this kind. His ministry published his text the same day, six pages and forty-four numbered paragraphs, under headings his own side wrote. Under the heading Scope of the Dispute, at paragraph 28, he said the scope of these proceedings concerns only maritime boundary delimitation between Thailand and Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand. That means agreeing where the sea boundary runs.
Cambodia’s Agent is Prak Sokhonn, its Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. He asked for three things, in order. First, a treaty drawing one maritime boundary good for every purpose, so that a single line settles the seabed and the water above it. Failing that, in the alternative, an agreement for joint development, which means exploring and sharing what lies under the disputed water without first settling whose water it is. Failing both, a report from the panel, with recommendations the two could build an agreement on later.
Cambodia’s text says why it wants the line. It has been trying since the mid-1990s to reach the resources under that water, to fuel the industrial growth its neighbours have had for decades, and those resources are still unexplored.
The middle request is the object Thailand’s sentence excludes. Joint development is not delimitation, and Thailand’s text says the scope is delimitation only. The words joint development appear nowhere in its forty-four paragraphs.
That is a reading of what the words cover, not of what Thailand meant by them, and the text carries a second reading. Two paragraphs on, Sihasak says the conciliation does not concern sovereignty over land, including the island of Ko Kut, and that there has never been a debate about it. The only in paragraph 28 may be aimed at land rather than at sharing resources.
The middle request is also, in Cambodia’s own ordering, the fallback. The treaty comes first, and the first thing Cambodia asked for is the same thing Thailand names as the whole of the case.
Neither Agent cited an article of UNCLOS, and neither text objects to the panel’s power to hear the case.
The two published texts differ in kind. Thailand’s ministry issued its Agent’s, numbered paragraph by paragraph. Cambodia’s ministry issued page images of an English text headed Revised, which is not the same as a record of what was said. Khaosod English transcribed both deliveries from the webcast, Thailand’s and Cambodia’s, and Cambodia’s requests are quoted here from that transcript.
Thailand announced on 5 May that it was ending the 2001 memorandum of understanding, under which the two had run talks on both the sea boundary and joint development where their claims overlap. Cambodia’s statement calls that a unilateral cancellation. Thailand’s calls it a termination, and says Thailand chose to give negotiations a fresh start.
Sihasak told the panel he had personally proposed direct talks on the boundary to his counterpart, and that if six months produced nothing the two could go to conciliation together. Cambodia disregarded the option, he said. His text gives no date for the proposal and no channel for it, though it places a meeting with Prak Sokhonn in New York in May. Prak Sokhonn’s statement says nothing about any such offer.
Thailand’s text also calls Cambodia’s ratification of UNCLOS very recent. Cambodia ratified on 6 February and it took effect for Cambodia on 8 March. The case was filed on 2 June, just under four months later.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration runs the paperwork and the hearings for the panel and decides nothing itself. Nothing from the three days in Singapore has reached its news page. The newest item there on the case is the notice of 9 September that set the meeting.
What the two sides filed in writing is another matter. Thailand’s ministry says Cambodia sent its notification on 2 June and Thailand answered on 19 June. Neither has been published. So whether Cambodia asked for the same three things in June, in the filing that opened the case, is not something anyone outside the two governments can check.