Human rights

A day after the ruling party filed a defamation complaint against one of the country’s most prominent political commentators, Prime Minister Hun Sen on Tuesday defended limitations on freedom of speech as being necessary for peace and stability. ...

 Prime Minister Hun Sen has called for legal action against those who “twist” the truth to malign the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, taking aim at the nation’s political analysts and commentators, with one of its most prominent, Ou Virak, the first in the crosshairs.  ...

Cambodia ranked 128th in Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2015 ranking of press freedom in countries across the world, the watchdog said yesterday on its website. ...

Soeung Hai, a dissident former monk wanted for arrest by the government, said on Tuesday that he had been living in Sweden since February after the U.N.’s refugee agency helped him secure political asylum there. ...

The Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts has banned a screening of a documentary film about murdered environmentalist Chut Wutty and threatened “strong action” against the venue if films continue to be shown without first being cleared by the government.   ...

As the opposition marked the 41st anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, one of its senior officials yesterday lashed out at the imprisonment of a CNRP lawmaker for criticising the government’s handling of the Vietnamese border issue. ...

Alex Gonzalez-Davidson, the outspoken director of the environmental group Mother Nature, has written to the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders to request that he pressure the government to release three Mother Nature activists imprisoned on charges stemming from an anti-sand ...

The U.S. State Department’s annual Human Rights Report, released on Wednesday, highlights poor treatment of Cambodia’s political opposition in 2015, and raises concerns about the judiciary’s “broad interpretation” of the crime of incitement.   ...

Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia, is the President of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the country’s ruling party since 1979. In recent years, when an opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), started gaining momentum and making their voices heard, Sen’s government found ...

The government’s suppression of human rights poses a serious threat to Cambodia’s democratic progress, visiting members of the European Parliament’s human rights subcommittee warned on Friday.   ...

The U.N.’s human rights envoy to Cambodia said the political climate had clearly deteriorated in the six months since her first fact-finding mission and that the country remained at a “dangerous tipping point” ahead of commune and national elections. ...

The United Nations Human Rights Commission in Cambodia (OHCHR) yesterday released an analysis of the contentious draft trade union law finding key clauses to be in violation of existing Cambodian law, human rights norms and the ILO’s conventions.   ...

After police in Preah Vihear province blocked the U.N.’s human rights envoy from meeting with indigenous villagers earlier this week, Rhona Smith sat down with Interior Minister Sar Kheng in Phnom Penh on Wednesday and called for better communication between national and local government officials. ...

Former residents of Phnom Penh’s Borei Keila community on Wednesday handed petitions to the U.N.’s human rights envoy to Cambodia, requesting that she intervene in their feud with authorities after they were snubbed by City Hall earlier in the day.   ...

The independence of the country’s judiciary was among the issues that UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights Rhona Smith raised yesterday during a meeting with the minister of justice as part of her 10-day visit. ...

The U.N.’s human rights envoy to Cambodia met with local rights advocates on Monday as she began her second fact-finding mission to the country, one of the meeting’s attendees said.   ...

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Cambodia today announced she will be visiting the country Monday to assess the enjoyment of rights by women and indigenous peoples in the country. ...

The two-kilometer stretch of white sand that curves along  translucent sea in an idyllic bay near Sihanoukville was still living up to its picture-perfect mystique on Sunday, with couples strolling hand-in-hand beneath the cloudless sky as others slouched in cushioned chairs soaking up the sun. ...

More than 200 activists attempting to cycle from the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to the National Assembly in Phnom Penh to mark International Women’s Day were penned in by authorities Tuesday morning after pedaling less than 100 meters.​ ...

As the government issued a familiar package of platitudes and promises on International Women’s Day, a walk through a single rural village in Kandal offered a shocking glimpse into how widespread – and widely accepted – domestic abuse remains in the Kingdom. ...

Roughly 100 Phnom Penh residents who believe they will be affected by a planned expressway leading from the airport to the city centre protested again at the Ministry of Public Works yesterday, demanding that community representatives be included on the committee that settles such matters ...

Cambodia’s ambassador to Asean on Friday rebuked his U.S. counterpart for comments she made on the country’s human rights situation, asking her to refrain from “criticizing Cambodia inappropriately.” ...

Cambodia has been taken to task in Amnesty International’s latest global report, which said the Southeast Asian country continued to abuse human rights while allowing impunity to continue unchecked. ...

The top U.S. envoy to ASEAN said on Wednesday that despite trade and security issues being at the cen­ter of last week’s U.S.-ASEAN Sum­mit, U.S. President Barack Obama also used the setting to address the region’s human rights problems. ...