Cambodia committed to honor refugee deal with Australia

Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn said on Thursday that the country is committed to honoring the refugee resettlement agreement that it signed with Australia nearly two years ago, according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Chum Sounry.

The minister showed the commitment during a meeting with newly-designated Australian Ambassador to Cambodia Angela Corcoran.

"His Excellency expressed the commitment of the Royal Government of Cambodia in continuing to implement the Memorandum of Understanding on Refugee Resettlement that the two countries had signed," the spokesman told reporters after the talks.

"This is the official position of the Royal Government of Cambodia," he said.

For her part, Angela highly appreciated the Cambodian government for its commitment to carry out the deal.

Cambodia and Australia reached the refugee agreement in September 2014 and the pact would be valid until September 2018.

Under the multimillion-U.S.-dollar deal, Canberra can send refugees, who intend to seek asylum in Australia and are being held in an offshore detention camp in the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru, to resettle in Cambodia.

However, only five (three Iranians and two Myanmar men) of hundreds of refugees on Nauru have agreed to resettle in Cambodia since the agreement was struck, and four of them had decided to go back to their birth countries after spending months in Cambodia.

Currently, only one refugee from Nauru still continues to live in Cambodia. Endit