With time running short before Laos’s Xayaburi hydropower dam enters its final, potentially irreversible stages of construction, a group of NGOs has made another call for its suspension. In a joint declaration released today, 39 organisations based in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Australia set a one-year ...

Pen Siman, the general director of the Ministry of Finance’s general department of customs and excise, will retire in October, according to a royal decree signed by King Norodom Sihamoni and reprinted Wednesday in local media. Dated April 3, the royal decree instructs Prime Minister Hun ...

The opposition party leader Sam Rainsy sent an open letter Tuesday to Interior Minister Sar Kheng to resume talks between the two parties to break the current political deadlock. “I would like to inform all observers that today [Tuesday] I contacted Deputy Prime Minister and Interior ...

Bankrupt telecommunications company Mfone yesterday handed out the final instalments of unpaid wages to former employees. More than 1,000 former Mfone staffers received the remaining 30 per cent of their unpaid wages after the telecommunications firm filed for bankruptcy in February 2013. Since then, workers have ...

The Electoral Reform Alliance, a group of election monitors and NGOs, put its support behind the opposition CNRP’s demands for a two-thirds majority vote for selecting members of the National Election Committee (NEC) at a workshop Tuesday in Phnom Penh. The process for selecting members of ...

The Phnom Penh Municipal Court has rejected a request from two former members of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers’ Democratic Union (CCAWDU) to have the union’s president be forced to step down as he is investigated for embezzlement. Former CCAWDU officials Oum Visal and Roeun ...

Villagers representing families in Kratie province petitioned the South Korean Embassy for help Tuesday in their dispute with a South Korean agribusiness firm, after hearing that the embassy had lodged a complaint against them. About 200 villagers from Kratie province’s Snuol district are staying at the ...

The number of Cambodian rural households with access to latrines increased from 23 to 33 per cent in 2013, a Ministry of Rural Development report released yesterday says. Chreay Pom, director of the ministry’s rural health care department, said that last year, the ministry constructed about ...

The number of mobile subscribers in Cambodia topped 20 million last year, surpassing the country’s population by about 5 million. Internet users also jumped, according to a report released Wednesday by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. The report fails to say how many Cambodians own ...

More than 50 land rights activists from two Phnom Penh communities filed a complaint Wednesday with police over an incident in which an unidentified man allegedly fired a shot at a bus transporting them from an anti-eviction protest in Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. The city’s ...

Dozens of houses have been marked for demolition near Phnom Penh International Airport as authorities say the families must be moved to bring the site in line with international standards. Civil aviation officials visited Chrey Chisark village in Por Sen Chey district’s Choam Choa commune with ...

The South Korean ambassador to Cambodia, Kim Han-soo, on Monday denied having asked the Labor Ministry to stop a strike at a South Korean-owned garment factory last week, but said the dispute has put a $40 million investment from the parent company on hold. On Sunday, ...

A fishing community that abandoned a stretch of the Tonle Sap river in Phnom Penh’s Russey Keo district earlier this month after dead fish began appearing in the water have brought their floating houses back home, authorities and community representatives said yesterday. The 29 families who ...

As Cambodian migrant workers return in droves from Thailand through the casino-laden border town of Poipet, Prime Minister Hun Sen is warning gambling parlour owners this does not mean a jackpot for them. “Casinos in Phnom Penh and along the border are not for Khmer citizens,” ...

Foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Sunday reiterated their continued commitment to the realization of ASEAN Community by 2015 and beyond. They pledged their commitment in the joint communique issued on the final day of their 47th annual meeting in Nay ...

More than 15 months after a Global Witness report revealed that Vietnam’s state-owned rubber giant had illegally cleared land and displaced communities in Cambodia, the company has announced that it will accept and respond to complaints from those whose lives it has damaged. Vietnam Rubber Group, ...

Cambodia is the third most at-risk country to money laundering and terrorist financing in the world, according to a global index released last month, trailing only Iran and Afghanistan. The Anti-Money Laundering Index, first published by the Swiss-based Basel Institute on Governance in 2012, assigns the ...

Representatives of Oddar Meanchey villagers who allegedly lost their homes in a 2008 land grab by Thai-owned sugar giant Mitr Phol are hopeful a settlement may soon be reached after they testify before Thai human rights officials today. Witnesses representing more than 400 families are slated ...

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and his Lao counterpart Thongsing Thammavong agreed to conclude negotiations on the signing of a new bilateral trade agreement, which forms the legal framework for achieving the two countries’ goal of 2 billion USD in trade by 2015. The agreement is ...

The Vientiane-based Mekong River Commission will hold a regional public consultation on a controversial dam project in Laos later this month. The Don Sahong dam discussion will allow civil society and other relevant stakeholders to voice their concerns over the dam’s impacts, the commission said in ...