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Prime Minister Hun Manet told a summit of Asian leaders in Azerbaijan on Thursday that border disputes with Thailand remain unresolved and cited Cambodia’s “commitment to international law” and to fighting transnational crime.
Hun Manet addressed the seventh summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, a 29-member forum spanning Asia and the Middle East.. He focused largely on hot-button issues for Cambodia: lingering border tensions with Thailand after deadly clashes last year, and his government’s crackdown on industrial-scale scam compounds that bilk victims worldwide out of tens of billions of dollars a year and often rely on trafficked workers.
“We believe that dialogue, de-escalation and faithful implementation of joint bilateral agreement, especially border demarcation and agreed confidence-building measures are crucial for creating conditions for fair and lasting settlement of dispute and peaceful coexistence,” Hun Manet said.
He was referring in part to the Joint Boundary Commission, a decades-old mechanism Cambodia and Thailand have used to resolve border issues. Its work has been frozen since June, when Thailand said it would halt bilateral border talks while a separate maritime dispute goes through U.N.-backed conciliation. Thailand says it is ready to resume the commission’s work when conditions allow.
The 48-year-old leader, who succeeded his father, Hun Sen, in 2023 after Hun Sen’s nearly four decades in power, also highlighted what his government says are 20,000 Cambodians who remain displaced since a December ceasefire halted the fighting. Cambodia blames what it calls Thailand’s forced occupation of border areas.
Thailand maintains that the disputed areas are either Thai territory that Cambodians occupied after fleeing civil war in the 1970s, or front lines frozen in place under the ceasefire agreement.
The neighbors have traded blame for two rounds of border fighting last year that killed more than 100 people and temporarily displaced hundreds of thousands on both sides.
Thailand’s Foreign Ministry and its embassy in Phnom Penh did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Hun Manet also called for closer cooperation against cybercrime and online scams, saying such crimes “cannot be effectively addressed by any country acting alone.” He pointed to an international conference on online scams that Cambodia recently hosted, which produced a declaration backed by 26 countries.
Cambodia has faced criticism that its crackdown has failed to protect people trafficked into scam compounds or to prosecute senior figures linked to the industry. The U.S. this year gave Cambodia its lowest trafficking rating, saying traffickers behind scam centers escape prosecution.
On the sidelines of the summit, Cambodia and Azerbaijan signed memorandums of understanding on economic cooperation, education and avoiding double taxation, and agreed to set up a joint working group on trade and investment.
The summit also coincided with a separate maritime dispute with Thailand. In The Hague on Thursday, the two countries’ foreign ministers were in a second round of talks before a conciliation commission set up under a U.N. maritime treaty. Cambodia launched the process in June after Thailand scrapped a 2001 agreement on negotiating overlapping claims and jointly developing oil and gas in the Gulf of Thailand. Talks under that deal had stalled for years.
Cambodia has long sought to take its border disputes with Thailand, many involving ancient temples, to international bodies, including the International Court of Justice. Thailand does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction and has insisted on settling disputes bilaterally, making its participation in the maritime conciliation a rare exception.