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Cambodia has appointed two international legal experts to join Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn on a U.N. conciliation commission over a long-running maritime boundary dispute with Thailand, an official said on Thursday.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Chan Ratana told a local media outlet that Denmark’s Peter Taksøe-Jensen, a diplomat and international law expert, and French academic Jean-Marc Thouvenin had been named to the commission.
Cambodia on Tuesday launched the rarely used conciliation process under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS.
The move followed Thailand’s decision last month to withdraw from a 2001 agreement that provided a framework for talks on overlapping claims in the Gulf of Thailand and joint hydrocarbon exploration in an area believed to hold up to $300 billion in oil and natural gas reserves.
The mechanism allows a panel of independent experts to examine a dispute and issue recommendations, though its findings are not legally binding.
The process has been used only once before, when Timor-Leste in 2016 successfully resolved a decades-long maritime dispute with Australia. Taksøe-Jensen chaired the commission that oversaw those negotiations.
Sokhonn said on Tuesday that Thailand had 21 days to respond to the notice. Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul later told reporters he was unaware Cambodia had initiated the process, but said his government would use UNCLOS principles in its next steps.
If Bangkok does not appoint conciliators, Cambodia can ask the U.N. secretary-general to appoint them on its behalf, according to a Cambodian government statement.
Tensions between the neighbors have remained high since two rounds of border clashes in July and December last year killed more than 100 people and displaced nearly a million on both sides before a ceasefire was reached.
The Thai embassy in Phnom Penh and Thailand’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
