MELBOURNE, Australia — A recent agreement between Indonesia and Vietnam over maritime boundaries in the South China Sea will likely smooth over the occasionally tense relationship between the two South East Asian nations.
The agreement, inked Dec. 22, follows 12 years of negotiations, and comes 19 years after both countries adopted a delineation of the continental shelf boundary between them.
Details of the agreement and the delineation remain classified. The Vietnamese and Indonesian defense ministries did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
“Practically, the successful Indonesia-Vietnam EEZ [exclusive economic zone] demarcation will help both countries to resolve illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, which has been a serious bilateral irritant and a broader issue involving third-party countries, including China and Thailand,” according to Bich Tran, a visiting fellow writing in the Fulcrum, a publication of the ISEAS—Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
The agreement also “provides hope for the strengthening of the region’s commitment to international maritime norms and principles, as encapsulated in the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea,” he wrote, allowing the two countries “to assert their respective sovereign international maritime rights and enforce their maritime interests.”
According to international law, an exclusive economic zone includes waters extending up to 200 nautical miles from a country’s coast, where that nation has exclusive rights to explore and exploit the natural resources within.
The new agreement caps off high-profile visits of senior Indonesian and Vietnamese leaders to each other’s countries over the past year, beginning with a May visit to the Vietnamese capital Hanoi by Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto to meet his counterpart, Gen. Phan Văn Giang.
During the visit, both countries agreed to step up cooperation between their respective security and defense agencies, including increased bilateral interactions, training and consultations.
This was followed by a December visit to Indonesia by then-Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc, who attended a summit with his Indonesian counterpart Joko Widodo in the city of Bogor. It was this meeting where both countries agreed on the boundaries between their respective exclusive economic zones.
Source: Defense News
