Social development

Despite repeated vows by both of Cambodia’s major political parties to increase female representation, the number of female candidates elected in the Kingdom’s recently concluded commune elections actually decreased since they were last held in 2012.   ...

A Japanese NGO yesterday signed a deal worth nearly $300,000 to assist four Kandal province primary schools in providing access to education for children with disabilities. ...

The Chinese government has pledged to build a vocational training centre in Preah Sihanouk province to help Cambodians develop skills for the workplace. Labour Minister Ith Samheng signed the deal to build the centre as he led ministry delegates on an official visit to China this ...

In a surprise move, four human rights workers and an election official, collectively known as the “Adhoc 5”, were released from pretrial detention yesterday evening, 427 days after they were taken into custody on bribery charges relating to an opposition sex scandal. ...

Authorities in Siem Reap province have stopped negotiating with hundreds of families who recently built homes and shops illegally inside the Angkor Archaeological Park, and Defense Minister Tea Banh said they would start razing the structures without their consent. ...

The government wants to train 50,000 tourism professionals every year between now and 2025 under a new development strategy for human resources within the tourism sector.​ ...

Representatives from housing NGOs yesterday called on the government to do more to help disadvantaged communities access affordable housing. They were speaking at the National Housing Forum, hosted by Habitat for Humanity Cambodia (HHC) at the Intercontinental Hotel, which brought together  NGOs and Land Management Minister ...

Senators will tomorrow discuss the appointment of opposition candidate Kun Lum Ang as a replacement for her imprisoned husband Hong Sok Hour. ...

Riot police were deployed near Phnom Penh’s Wat Chas on Monday to prevent about 30 people from marching to the National Assembly to submit a petition seeking a new national holiday marking the day the French officially handed former Kampuchea Krom provinces to Vietnam. ...

The Unesco representative in Cambodia has expressed support for the Apsara Authority’s actions to prevent the spread of illegal constructions in the Angkor Archaeological Park. ...

The National Election Committee will hold a meeting with political parties and civil society organisations next month to discuss the high number of invalid ballots in the commune elections. Of more than 7 million ballots cast, 133,484 were deemed invalid. ...

More than a month after confirming its investigation into new reports of rampant timber trafficking between Cambodia and Vietnam, the Environment Ministry remains tight-lipped about what—if any—progress it is making, but says the U.K. NGO that exposed the scale of the problem is itself being ...

Sixteen families in Kandal have accused a purported Interior Ministry official of sending soldiers to intimidate them to take their land, though the official denied the claims and said no such dispute existed at all. ...

Transparency International (TI) Cambodia yesterday said that the ruling Cambodian People’s Party appeard to have won 49.4 percent of the nationwide popular vote on June 4 based on the stations it monitored, nearly six percentage points ahead of the CNRP’s 43.2 percent. ...

CNRP President Kem Sokha has promised opposition supporters among the Cham Muslim community that any government he leads would put an end to political harassment from the community’s pro-CPP leaders, whom he claimed pressured followers not to join his party. ...

The 13-month investigation into five current and former human rights workers known as the ‘Adhoc 5’ has ended, a court spokesman said on Wednesday, paving the way for a trial in a case widely condemned as being unjust and politically motivated. ...

Cambodia Youth Party leader Pich Sros filed a complaint today at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court against Cambodia National Rescue Party leader Kem Sokha in response to the latter’s encouragement of voters not to “waste” their votes on small parties. ...

Students at schools in Cambodia will learn about the life, achievements and leadership of Prime Minister Hun Sen under a proposal by the Defence Ministry to change the nation’s curriculum and introduce the ruling party’s fiercely contested historical narrative into textbooks. ...

The government body charged with managing the Angkor Archaeological Park on Monday started tearing down the first of more than 500 homes and shophouses illegally built within the park in the weeks before the June 4 commune elections. ...

An NGO coalition launched a program to collaborate more closely with the government on Wednesday, a week after an Interior Ministry spokesman admitted to threatening several organizations in order to “scare” them ahead of commune elections. CCC executive director Soeung Saran said the problems between ...

Human Rights Watch (HRW), long one of the government’s harshest critics, on Tuesday condemned the June 4 commune elections as “neither free nor fair” and called for urgent reforms to safeguard next year’s national election. ...

Despite vows by both major political parties to increase female representation in politics, women made up only a small proportion of commune chiefs chosen in this month’s elections, though some gains were made by the opposition party.   ...

A new school course would teach children from grades 5 to 12 for the first time about LGBT issues, sex and gender-based violence, as part of a proposed Ministry of Education curriculum.   ...

As the National Election Committee launched into the recount process for contested communes yesterday, an election watchdog coalition announced it had found that 95 percent of a sample of polling stations’ vote count forms from the election body matched those compiled by the group itself. ...