CPG had the pleasure this morning of hosting a closed-door roundtable at the Faculty of Law, Thammasat University, on “The South China Sea at a Crossroads: Philippine and Thai Perspectives on International Law, Regional Security and Strategic Competition.”

The roundtable was jointly organized with FACTS Asia, a Philippine nonprofit research organization working on foreign policy and broader public policy issues, as part of a visit to Thailand by a high-level seven-member delegation.

The delegation was led by Julio Amador III, Founder and Trustee of FACTS Asia and Executive Director of the Philippine-American Educational Foundation. It also included Justice Antonio T. Carpio (Ret.), former Senior Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines; H.E. Laura del Rosario (Ret.), former Philippine Ambassador to India and Vietnam and former Undersecretary for International Economic Relations; Dr. Aries Arugay, Professor of Political Science at the University of the Philippines Diliman; Neil Simon Silva, Senior Researcher at the UP Law Center – Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea; Deryk Baladjay, faculty member at De La Salle University and Research Manager at Amador Research Services; and Florence Principe Gamboa, Managing Editor and Coordinator of FACTS Asia.

CPG was represented by Director Henning Glaser, together with its two long-standing Senior Research Fellows, H.E. Kasit Piromya, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Thailand, and H.E. Tomwit Jarnson, former Thai Ambassador, as well as Lucas Meier, Venus Phuangkom, and Dr. Duc Quang Ly.

Beyond the substantive exchange, we were particularly pleased to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with FACTS Asia, laying the foundation for closer institutional cooperation.

We thank our guests from the Philippines for the open and engaging exchange and look forward to continuing it in the future. Our special thanks go to H.E. Kasit Piromya and H.E. Tomwit Jarnson for their participation and their long-standing and steady support for CPG’s work.