Cambodia and Thailand are trying out an obscure United Nations tool to try and settle a decades-long maritime territorial dispute that could lead to unlocking hundreds of billions of dollars in oil and gas reserves.
Earlier this month, Phnom Penh filed a notice for "compulsory consultation" under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Cambodia and Thailand are both party to.
In effect, that invited Thailand to join Cambodia in UN-backed conciliation talks over their 26,000 square kilometers (10,000 square miles) of overlapping claims in the Gulf of Thailand.
The filing comes after Thailand in May pulled out of a 2001 agreement with Cambodia that had committed the pair to settling the competing claims and jointly developing the oil and gas fields.
Thailand's pullout of the memorandum of understanding comes amid tensions between the neighbors that have been running high since a land border dispute turned deadly last year.
