On 22 April 2026, at the 2026 ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development Follow-up, Thailand exercised its right of reply following the statement made by the Cambodian delegation during the General Debate.

In exercising this right, Mr. Cherdchai Chaivaivid, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Thailand to the United Nations, reiterated that Thailand consistently supported peace-building, nation-building, and development in Cambodia since its independence in 1953, through its civil war in the 1970s and 1980s—when Thailand played host to hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fleeing the conflict at any given time, and about a million displaced persons in total over the course of the crisis—through the Paris Peace Agreements of 1991, and its membership of ASEAN in 1999, helping to re-integrate Cambodia into the international community and global economy. Since COVID-19, Thailand had provided technical assistance of over USD 17 million to Cambodia in the form of development assistance, projects, and scholarships.

These efforts had, however, produced a negative rate of return to the mutually beneficial relations Thailand had nourished over the years.
In July and December 2025, Cambodia initiated unprovoked and indiscriminate armed attacks on Thai territory. These attacks claimed 19 civilian lives, injured 51 others, displaced over 400,000 people, and affected more than 400 hospitals. Thailand was therefore obliged to exercise its inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.

Ambassador Cherdchai pointed out that Cambodia had suffered gravely from landmines and received substantial official development assistance (ODA) for mine clearance, yet it continued to plant new ones. As a result, border areas—where people of both sides could have been engaging in economic activities and development—had now become contaminated with landmines.

It was also well documented that Cambodia hosted a number of online scam syndicates, with estimated annual revenues as high as 19 billion USD, equivalent to nearly 40% of the country's GDP. This had caused financial losses for victims across the globe, not to mention tens of thousands of forced labors and victims of human trafficking. And this was money lost to crime, at the cost of development.