Human rights

More than 30 families in the capital’s Boeung Kak community are still waiting for official land titles six weeks after City Hall officials measured ground at the site of a years-long land dispute, villagers have said. The Phnom Penh Municipality began measuring land in villages 6, ...

An NGO is working to free two Cambodian women forced into marriage in China, a representative of the organisation said yesterday. Huy Pichsovann, program officer at the Community Legal Education Center (CLEC), said that the two women, aged 22 and 27, were enticed from their Kampong ...

US national Daniel Stephen Johnson was transferred to Prey Sar prison yesterday after being charged on Saturday over the alleged rape of five underage boys – residents of the orphanage he ran without interference from authorities for several months. According to Phnom Penh Municipal Court prosecutor ...

In its switch to a strategy of nonstop demonstrations calling for a new election, the opposition party has made a calculated decision to go “all-in” and toughen its stance in a bid to ramp up domestic pressure on the ruling party, political analysts said yesterday. Since ...

Land certificates handed out by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s youth volunteers have been seized by local authorities in some parts of the country and sold on to companies, a forum on land rights was told yesterday, amid reports of rising numbers of land conflicts. Speaking at ...

Since 2011, an estimated 3,000 resin trees have been illegally razed by rogue loggers and a land concessionaire operating in Mondulkiri’s Sen Monorom district, villagers claimed yesterday. Resin trees are a vital source of income for the Phnong ethnic community in Sokdom commune, according to Thleuk ...

Kimseang spent much of his childhood enduring harassment and verbal abuse, with teachers and other children dismissing him because of a visual and physical impairment. While the kingdom has seen overall access to education improve from a 69 per cent net enrollment rate in 1991 ...

Civil society groups held a workshop in Phnom Penh on Thursday in which government officials and lawmakers were invited to discuss post-election land grabs and land-based conflict, although the ruling CPP failed to turn up to the event. Though incidents of land-grabbing appeared to decrease ahead ...

A day after authorities carted away 11 protesters intending to camp out in front of the United States embassy, a similarly ad hoc group of citizens struggled to deliver petitions to three embassies in the capital yesterday. The group of about 50 were blocked by police ...

The first ever Annual Journalism Ethics Awards ceremony was held Wednesday in Phnom Penh, which conferred a total of 19 awards on five national newspapers and eight national television stations in recognition of their adherence to ethical journalism. The newspapers garnering awards in categories including balance ...

Cambodia hopes to legalise undercover investigative techniques – like covert surveillance and officers posing as criminals, which until now have fallen into a murky legal grey area – by next year. At a workshop in the capital yesterday, law enforcement officials and representatives of human rights ...

Communities threatened by the planned construction of three hydropower dams in Stung Treng and Ratanakkiri provinces will today submit to the Chinese Embassy a petition demanding that the embassy intervene against Chinese companies investing in the dams. The petition, to be presented in Chinese, Khmer and ...

City Hall announced a new plan to improve living standards in the city’s poorest areas Tuesday on International Human Rights Day, while representatives for the urban poor continued to call on the municipality to issue longsought after land titles. Addressing a crowd of 600 at Olympic ...

A day of peaceful demonstrations gave way to an evening of unrest last night as a handful of protesters were removed from a small patch of land across from the United States embassy and a grup of uninvolved people threw Molotov cocktails towards riot police ...

Seila, a tall, heavily made-up woman with orange-blonde hair, said she was in a park in Siem Reap last year when policemen approached her, put a gun to her head and told her if she ran, they would shoot. Legally, the Kingdom’s Constitution protects the ...

Although International Human Rights Day ended in the forceful eviction of protesters from outside the US embassy last night, monks and their supporters who spent days marching to the capital met with no opposition in the morning as they defied a ban on marching to ...

A cameraman from the state-run Television Kampuchea (TVK) was assaulted at Freedom Park on Tuesday as he tried to film CNRP leaders at a rally to mark International Human Rights Day, the victim and Information Minister Khieu Kanharith said. Seng Chan, 34, said he was slapped ...

Phnom Penh City Hall issued a letter Monday banning a group of monks who have marched cross-country to mark International Human Rights Day from completing the final leg of their journey, in which they had hoped to hand petitions to lawmakers at the National Assembly ...

KANDAL PROVINCE – At Kandal provincial prison on Monday, about 100 male and female prisoners and pretrial detainees assembled to play games and receive fruit and drinks from rights group Licadho, which is visiting 18 prisons around the country this week in a bid to ...

Interior Minister Sar Kheng has ordered all prison, detention and rehabilitation center chiefs to accommodate and give full access to delegates from the U.N.’s Subcommittee on the Prevention of Torture (SPT), whose five-day mission to assess the use of torture, cruelty and other inhumane treatment ...

The government will deploy double the usual number of armed security personnel on the streets of Phnom Penh on Tuesday to keep control of the large number of rallies planned in the city to celebrate International Human Rights Day, a military police official said Monday. “We ...

A law student who filed a complaint with the Phnom Penh Municipal Court against the city’s police and military police chiefs over the fatal shooting of a bystander by authorities during a protest last month took his complaint to the U.N.’s human rights office on ...

Cambodia ranked third worst in “global suffering” last year—behind Bulgaria and Armenia—a significant increase from 2011, when it ranked 14th worst, ac-cording to the worldwide polling group Gallup. A poll released last week on Gallup’s website says 34 percent of Cambodian respondents rated their lives as ...

Cambodian authorities unlawfully detain hundreds of drug users and others deemed “undesirable” in centers where they face torture, sexual violence, and forced labor, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Human Rights Watch called for the immediate closure of the country’s eight detention ...