Months after deadly clashes that cost dozens of lives along their shared border, the foreign ministers of Cambodia and Thailand laid out opening arguments on Tuesday over a different kind of territory: 27,000 sq km (10,400 square miles) of seabed thought to hold a fortune in gas and oil.
The venue was the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s Singapore office, where the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea’s conciliation commission is being asked to settle who controls a stretch of the Gulf of Thailand with hydrocarbon reserves worth an estimated US$300 billion.
It is only the second time in Unclos’ history that the conciliation process has been used. The first, initiated by East Timor against Australia in 2016, took nearly two years to resolve.