A cambodian traveling to Thailand on I'd card

[leon9mm]

Is it possible for a cambodian to travel to Thailand using their ID card instead of a passport now that ASEAN is up and running..

[khwaibah]

ASEAN is NOT up and running. The ID card will depend on the crossing and you will be limited to area. Get a passport and you'll have no problem.

[phuketrichard]

since when is ASEAN up an running??

[leon9mm]

Thanks for the reply...it seems I need to get that passport.. Thanks again

[phuketrichard]

its easy an cheap now and good for 10 years :-)

[Tomtomtom69]

Whoever thinks that ASEAN (actually it's called AEC or ASEAN Economic Community not ASEAN as ASEAN has been in existence since 1967) means no passports and freedom of movement for citizens like in the Schengen zone is seriously mistaken. Nowhere have I heard or read that has even been planned.

Where do people get this nonsense from?

To answer the OP's question: a Cambodian citizen can easily get a passport for whatever the Cambo government charges (probably not that much) and enter Thailand visa free for 14 days. Forget about an ID card, if accepted at all, it would limit travel to the border town entered and after the coup last year, some borders only accepted passports for entry, including from Thai/Cambodian citizens.

Citizens of member ASEAN states in many cases receive a shorter visa-free privilege, depending on the country they are entering, than citizens of far away countries. For example, Thais get just 30 days when entering Malaysia and Singapore by air, only 14 when they enter Singapore by land. By contrast, most westerners get 90 days for entry to both, irrespective of mode of transport.

So much for freedom of movement.

And while we're on the topic of AEC, I don't think there will be many changes in other areas either. The countries in this region can't even agree to implement their own signed agreements on such issues as cross-border transport. Back in 2003 an agreement was signed called the GMS agreement on cross-border transport that states any vehicle (covering cars, trucks and buses) registered in one of the 6 greater Mekong Sub-region countries (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam and China's Guangxi and Yunnan provinces) can enter to any other member country for tourism, business or trade purposes for a period not exceeding 30 days.

12 years later and where do we stand? There is still no way a Thai vehicle can travel all the way to Vietnam; in the reverse direction it is generally not possible either although there are reportedly exceptions made at times, particularly for motorcycles. Only Thailand and Laos, and Laos and Vietnam have official agreements with each other on the entry of vehicles registered in each other's country. Vietnam and Cambodia have some sort of agreement, but it's not exactly reciprocal either, while the Thais and Cambodians only have an agreement on the official transit of commercial vehicles.

You would think such an agreement would be easy to implement but this is ASEAN. This is but one example of the myriad of rules and regulations that probably won't be changed anytime soon, AEC or not.

Apart from a few minor cosmetic changes, I don't see much changing after December 31, 2015.