Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday issued a moratorium on economic land concessions, temporarily halting a long-standing policy of granting land to private companies and those with powerful political connections that has sparked growing concerns from national and international human rights groups. The prime minister’s announcement comes ...

The Cambodian veterinary authorities have reported two outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 in Kampong Speu province affecting backyard poultry as well as in Kandal, affecting duck flocks in two households. The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) received follow-up report no. 1 ...

Villagers from Koh Kong province delivered petitions in Phnom Penh on Friday seeking international intervention in their land dispute with powerful businessman and CPP senator Ly Yong Phat, alleging that his Koh Kong Special Economic Zone (SEZ) was encroaching on their farmland. Five representatives of the ...

Cambodia’s health ministry today announced two more H5N1 avian flu cases, both in children, the hardest-hit group in that country so far. The patients are a 9-year-old boy from Battambang province and a 5-year-old girl from Kandal province, according to a joint statement today from Cambodia’s ...

Women’s Affairs Minister Ing Kantha Phavi on Tuesday defended the government’s policies on promoting gender equality and preventing discrimination against women, but conceded that challenges remain in achieving principles set out in the U.N.’s convention to stop discrimination against women. Speaking in Geneva to the U.N. ...

Amnesty International on Friday lambasted a pending deal that would see people seeking asylum in Australia to be resettled in Cambodia. “Australia should be ending its offshore processing and detention of asylum seekers, not looking to outsource its refugee responsibilities to another, much poorer country,” ...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is trying to ease concerns over the social and economic costs of the country’s plan with Australia to receive refugees. U.S.-based Human Rights Watch has called for the deal to be halted until Cambodia improves its refugee support system. Hun Sen ...

The governor of Ratanakkiri province is not cooperating with efforts by the U.N. to negotiate safe passage for five Montagnard asylum seekers who crossed the border from Vietnam nearly two weeks ago, a U.N. official said Thursday. Wan-Hea Lee, the country representative for the U.N.’s Office ...

With rebuke raining down on the ruling CPP for its judicial assault, arrests and intimidation of the political opposition and other critics, Cambodia’s annual assessment by the U.N. Human Rights Council will be held next week in Geneva. ...

With 10 days remaining until a government-imposed deadline for the U.N.’s human rights office to either sign a new agreement to operate in the country or close down, there is no sign that the two sides have come any closer to reaching a deal. ...

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on Thursday denied reports that its suspension of all contracts with two major mosquito net suppliers found to have bribed Cambodian officials would cause a shortage in the worldwide supply of the critical malaria deterrent, but ...

Taiwan’s E. Sun Commercial Bank has purchased a 70 per cent stake in Cambodia’s Union Commercial Bank. The deal, planned for months but announced yesterday at a press conference at the Sofitel hotel in Phnom Penh, will bring technology upgrades and more loan capital to the ...

A seven-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister from Cambodia’s northeastern Kratie Province died from H5N1 human avian influenza on Friday bring the death number of the cases to three so far this year, a health official confirmed Wednesday. H5N1 influenza is a flu that normally ...

A UN delegation met with Ratanakkiri province’s deputy police chief yesterday afternoon to discuss the fate of 13 Montagnard asylum seekers who have been hiding in the province in recent weeks. The provincial administration, however, has continued to call for the group’s deportation. Deputy police chief ...

The U.N.’s expert on housing rights has cited the World Bank’s failure to help thousands of families evicted from Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak neighborhood as a prime example of why the bank needs to make human rights a focus of its land sector programs worldwide. At ...

About 50 families gathered under a timber roof here Sunday among muddy fields granted to them as compensation after China’s Union Development Group (UDG) began to turn their coastal homeland into a $3.8-billion tourist mecca. The families, who now live in timber houses dotting the barren ...

Lawmakers from the European Union (E.U) are again urging the block’s trade commissioner to investigate Cambodia’s Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) over a raft of alleged rights abuses and consider revoking the duty free access their owners currently enjoy to member states. Going mostly to industrial ...

Displaced villagers from two Phnom Penh neighborhoods on Wednesday submitted a petition to the UN’s human rights envoy, who is in Cambodia on a routine fact-finding mission. The envoy, Surya Subedi, was visiting the Phnom Penh eviction site of Borei Keila ...

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The Ministry of Labor hopes that a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will see Cambodia resume sending domestic workers to Malaysia by February, but negotiations on the document have stalled after Malaysia recently rejected 90 percent of proposed provisions to protect workers’ rights. Most strikingly, Malaysia ...