The recent diplomatic activity between the Thai and Cambodian governments has reopened stalled talks on the overlapping sea claims of the two Southeast Asian nations.
The overlapping claims in the Gulf of Thailand date back to the early 1970s, when Cambodia claimed a maritime territory of 200 nautical miles of the continental shelf in line with the Convention on the Continental Shelf of 1958. This provoked the Thai government to respond with a similar claim in 1973. The area in dispute between Cambodia and Thailand covers roughly 27,000 kilometers and holds an estimated 11 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. A similar overlapping claim between Malaysia and Thailand was resolved in 1979.
