Cambodia’s government says that it will seek a ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over its ongoing border dispute with Thailand, following a fatal military clash in a remote region last week.
In a Facebook post on Sunday, Prime Minister Hun Manet called for an urgent meeting of the Cambodia-Thailand Joint Border Commission and said that his government would ask the ICJ to rule on the demarcation of several disputed areas along the border.
“Cambodia hopes that the Thai side will agree with Cambodia to jointly bring these issues to the International Court of Justice … to prevent armed confrontation again over border uncertainty,” Hun Manet said during a meeting of Cambodian lawmakers, the AFP news agency reported. The assembled lawmakers, most of them from Manet’s Cambodian People’s Party, subsequently voted to support the government’s decision.
Manet’s announcements came after a 48-year-old Cambodian soldier was killed during a military clash on May 28, near Morokot village in Cambodia’s Preah Vihear province, close to the point where the borders of Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos converge.
The two sides blame each other for the firefight. In a letter to the Thai embassy the following day, Cambodia’s Foreign Ministry denounced the “unprovoked attack with firearms by Thai troops,” and demanded “an immediate and thorough investigation.” Conversely, the Thai military has claimed that Cambodian soldiers entered a disputed zone and opened fire when Thai soldiers approached them to negotiate.
In his Facebook post on Sunday, Hun Manet said that his government would ask the ICJ to rule on three disputed areas at various points along the 800-kilometer shared border. These include the areas containing the Ta Moan Thom, Ta Moan Toch, and Ta Krabei temples, Angkorian ruins that have been the subject of recent tensions, as well as an area close to the tri-border junction with Laos, where the May 28 clash took place.
On Monday, Manet, who is believed to have a good relationship with Thailand’s Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, said that involving the ICJ would help “to end this problem and extinguish it once and for all so that there is no further confusion.”
“Let’s not fall for the incitement of a handful of extremist groups in Cambodia and Thailand, and let’s not fall into the problem of confrontation by armed forces of the two countries,” he added.
Cambodia and Thailand have a long history of disputes along their shared land border, which was set by border treaties between Siam and French Indo-China in 1904 and 1907 but was never fully demarcated. In 2008, the two nations skirmished over Preah Vihear temple, an eleventh-century Angkorian ruin perched on the border, after UNESCO placed the temple on its World Heritage List. After several years of border tensions and sporadic military clashes, Cambodia took the case to the ICJ, which had awarded the temple in Cambodia in 1962. In 2013, it affirmed Cambodia’s sovereignty over the area.
Border tensions again began to simmer in February of this year, when Thailand sent a formal protest to Phnom Penh after a video of Cambodian troops and family members singing a patriotic song in front of Ta Moan Thom temple was posted on social media. At the same time, Cambodian and Thai nationalists reawakened a separate dispute over the two nations’ undemarcated maritime boundary, after Phnom Penh and Bangkok announced plans to resume negotiations over an Overlapping Claims Area in the Gulf of Thailand.
Thailand’s government has been unclear as to whether it would support the involvement of the ICJ. Thailand’s Foreign Minister Maris Sangiampongsa said Cambodia had the right to file a case with the court, and that it would not affect talks between the two countries, the Associated Press reported. The Thai military, however, has rejected the notion, suggesting that the disputes be managed within the existing mechanisms.
In his own Facebook post, Manet’s father Hun Sen, who led Cambodia for 38 years prior to handing over power in 2023, said that he supported the decision to take the case to the ICJ. “If the Thai side is truly sincere in resolving the issue, they should jointly agree to bring the case before the court without requiring Cambodia to file a complaint,” he wrote.
Cambodia is clearly banking on a favorable outcome at the ICJ, given its past successes with the Preah Vihear temple case in 1962 and 2013. However, as my colleague Luke Hunt noted in an article yesterday, the Preah Vihear temple dispute was different in several important respects. At the time of the clash, Cambodia was already armed with a supportive ICJ ruling handed down in 1962 and largely had international public opinion on its side.
Given some of the legal peculiarities of the Preah Vihear case – in particular, the divergence between a map drawn up by the Mixed Delimitation Commission set up after the Franco-Siamese treaty of 1904 and the agreed principle of where the border should run – it is also much less clear that the ICJ would support Cambodia’s claims to the areas mentioned by Hun Manet.
That said, pursuing an international legal remedy is probably the best way of resolving an issue that is the subject of heated nationalistic fervor in both nations.