International laws and treaties

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 ...

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 ...

Minister of Foreign Affairs Hor Namhong will on Saturday visit Royal Cambodian Armed Forces troops stationed in the Preah Vihear temple territory to explain the interpretation of the recent U.N. court ruling on the area, a Foreign Ministry official said. On November 11, the International ...

Cambodia will on Tuesday introduce measures intended to better serve disabled people living in the provinces and will hold its first workshop on the draft of a new five-year plan to improve disability services, the government said at an annual meeting of members to the ...

The long-awaited resumption of international adoptions may finally occur in the new year, officials from the ministries of Justice and Social Affairs said yesterday, though no time table is yet in place. While the freeze on adoptions – put in place in 2009 with the passage ...

Cambodia will resume international adoptions in 2014, more than four years after suspending them over concerns about child exploitation, an official said Wednesday. Deputy Social Affairs Minister Nim Thoth told reporters that foreigners interested in adopting Cambodian children would be able to make applications in the ...

The privately-operated International Ship Registry of Cambodia (ISROC), a South Korea-based company that owns the rights to register foreign vessels under the Cambodian flag, told ship owners last year that it was not monitoring their observance of international maritime laws, and that it was their ...

UNICEF Cambodia and the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH), including its Asia Pacific Regional Office will be hosting a two day national training and consultation seminar on domestic and inter-country adoption in Cambodia, according to a UNICEF media advisory. The ...

More than 10 percent of children in the country aged between 5 and 17 work as laborers, with more than 5 percent engaged in “hazardous labor,” a situation that must be addressed by the government, the International Labor Organization (ILO) said in a report released ...

An organisation made up of current and former elected representatives from across Southeast Asia has called on the United Nations to investigate the deaths of two people shot by police during protests over the past three months. In a statement released yesterday, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human ...

The battle against landmines could soon have an unlikely new weapon after a pioneering Belgian NGO signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the government on Monday to begin testing teams of sharp-sniffing rodents in Cambodia, with the goal of pitching them into the ongoing ...

As Laos pushes toward its goal of becoming the “battery of Asia” through hydropower, its newfound claim that the location for the proposed Don Sahong dam is not on the Mekong River’s main stream is provoking incredulity from some observers. Less than two kilometres north of ...

Cambodian and Thai military officials met yesterday morning to discuss the implementation of the International Court of Justice’s ruling on Preah Vihear, with both sides pledging to keep the peace and the Thais agreeing to withdraw to the new line of demarcation. Monday’s judgment declared that ...

The International Court of Justice yesterday unanimously declared that its 1962 judgment awarding the Preah Vihear temple to Cambodia also gave the Kingdom sovereignty over the promontory that the temple sits on. But while the announcement was initially greeted as a resounding victory by some in ...

Cambodia should have sovereignty over disputed land around the Preah Vihear temple on the border with Thailand, the UN’s highest court has ruled. The International Court of Justice in the Hague said Thailand must withdraw any soldiers from the area. Cambodia sought a clarification of the ...

Laos is taking steps to convince neighboring countries of the merits of the planned Don Sahong hydropower project over Mekong River. Lao government officials organized a site visit on Sunday and Monday so that interested parties could see the site first-hand and get a sense of ...

It has been one year since Cambodia announced that it was lifting its ban on intercountry adoptions beginning January 1, 2013, but despite praising Cambodia’s efforts to implement international regulations, countries that ban adoptions of Cambodians said this week that they were no closer to ...

A group of NGOs condemned rampant abuses of sexual and reproductive health rights in Cambodia last week, just days before the government submitted a human rights progress report to the United Nations. The Cambodian Center for Human Rights, in cooperation with the Asia Pacific Network of ...

Cambodia failed Monday to make its deadline to submit a key human rights report—known as the universal period review (UPR)—to the U.N., said Mak Sambath, deputy chairman of the government’s Human Rights Committee. Having missed the submission deadline, the government is now hoping to get its ...

Cambodia will submit a human rights report to the U.N. today for a universal periodic review (UPR), the second time it is participating in the process, according to the Council of Ministers’ Press and Quick Reaction Unit. Under the UPR process established in 2006, the Human ...

Cambodia has signed an international treaty designed to regulate the trade in conventional weapons, becoming the 114th country to formally pledge its support for the agreement, which was adopted by the U.N.’s General Assembly in April. Sea Kosal, Cambodia’s ambassador to the U.N. in New York, ...

More than two decades after the Paris Peace Agreement, which was meant to open the way for peace and multiparty democracy in Cambodia, legal experts and hu­man rights advocates said Tuesday the government has largely abandoned the vision of the accord. Speaking at a conference on ...

More than 55,000 people have joined an online petition set up by a pair of French nongovernment groups urging the European Union (E.U.) to immediately launch an investigation into local sugar plantations accused of illegally evicting hundreds of Cambodian families. At the center of the dispute ...

Developing the Don Sahong dam on the Hou Sahong channel of the Mekong River in Champassak province does not breach the 1995 Mekong Agreement, a senior government official has told local media. Deputy Minister of Energy and Mines, Mr Viraphonh Viravong, made the comment on Thursday, ...