Anutin Charnvirakul told Thai media on 27 May, on the sidelines of a trade exhibition at Impact Muang Thong Thani, that the 1:200,000-scale Franco-Siamese map Cambodia cites for its border claims no longer counts for his government, and that any party meaning to rely on that scale need not come to the table at all. He told The Nation the older scale “no longer exists” for Thailand, while allowing that his government would accept transparent technical verification of the line.

The scale Anutin set aside is not the term on which the governing instruments turn. The Memorandum of Understanding the two governments signed on 14 June 2000, and which Thailand registered with the United Nations in 2011, commits them in its first article to survey and demarcate the land boundary in accordance with the 1904 Franco-Siamese Convention, the 1907 Treaty and its annexed delimitation Protocol, and the maps that resulted from the Commissions of Delimitation. The article lists those documents and fixes no scale. That framework is still running: under its Joint Boundary Commission the two sides have located most of the 73 colonial-era markers, leaving the contested segments where the present argument sits.