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Australia and East Timor settle bitter border differences

Australia and East Timor will sign a treaty that draws the first-ever maritime border between the neighbors, resolving years of bitter wrangling with a deal that carves up billions of dollars of oil and gas riches that lie beneath the Timor Sea.

Australia and its impoverished half-island neighbor are to sign the agreement at the United Nations on Tuesday, putting to rest a dispute that has dominated and soured relations since 2002, when East Timor emerged as a fledgling nation independent of Indonesia.

The terms of the deal negotiated in The Hague through the Permanent Court of Arbitration have not been made public. But achieving East Timor's ambition of a border midway between the two countries would encourage Indonesia to renegotiate its own much longer maritime boundary with Australia agreed in 1971 under outdated international law. The Indonesian border with Australia extends east and west of the new East Timor-Australia boundary and the vast expanse Indonesia allowed Australia is a source of increasing irritation in the capital Jakarta.



Source :- yahoonews

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