Social development

Cambodian and international rights groups have renewed their calls for the release of Phnom Penh housing rights campaigner campaigner Yorm Bopha one year after her arrest, urging the public and national leaders not to forget her during the country’s current political deadlock. Global watchdog Amnesty International ...

More than 200 students and opposition supporters marched Sunday around Phnom Penh’s Wat Phnom with flowers in hand, urging parties to refrain from violence during Saturday’s protest against last month’s contested national election results and for recent incitement charges against two students to be dropped. The ...

Far stricter monitoring of the recruitment and employment of Cambodians and other migrant labourers is needed to ensure the future of the Thai fishing industry, a new study by the International Labour Organization warns. Two and a half per cent of the 241 Cambodians interviewed ...

Citing a lack of public confidence in the official post-election irregularity resolution process – namely, the Constitutional Council’s opening of vote packages – a coalition of leading civil society groups yesterday appealed to the two main political parties to swiftly come back to the negotiating ...

Calls for big-name apparel brands to take more responsibility for working conditions in Cambodian garment factories are growing louder as representatives of retail companies ranging from H&M to Wal-Mart arrive in Phnom Penh for a semi-annual buyers’ forum this week. Since it began three years ...

Straining under the weight of bricks, buckets and metal bars, a faceless army carry their loads from trucks to a massive building site on Penh Penh’s Diamond Island. Hidden beneath wide-brimmed hats and kramas masking their faces from dust and the sun, the battalion of ...

After nearly 50 garment workers were killed last year while travelling to or from their respective factories, the Ministry of Labour has urged truck drivers who cram dozens into the back of vehicles each day to take more care on the roads. In an information session ...

In mid-August, on day seven of production at the Coco Khmer social enterprise, the team experienced a setback. Temperatures in the fermenting room must remain between 35 and 40 degrees to produce the organization’s virgin coconut oil, but the temperature on that rainy day refused to ...

Phnom Penh is one of the least-livable cities in the world, but has also seen relatively strong improvement in quality of life over the past five years, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Global Livability Ranking released this month has found. The analysis of 140 cities, which ...

The judiciary has signed off on a new set of guidelines designed to regulate the work of prosecutors in many areas, including the rights of minors in the judicial system. Ouk Savuth, general director of the Court of Appeal, signed off on the guidelines on August ...

The National Election Committee (NEC) on Friday opened the safety ballot boxes from Siem Reap province to search for and verify any supposed election irregularities contained in documents 1102 and 1108, on Friday. The opening of ballot boxes from the 12 voting stations was held at ...

CNRP leader Sam Rainsy on Thursday publicly announced the opposition’s intention to conduct a campaign of civil disobedience in line with peaceful demonstrations organized by the charismatic leader of Indian nationalism Mahatma Gandhi, who helped win independence from Great Britain. Mr. Rainsy made the remarks at ...

A local Pursat province journalist filed a lawsuit yesterday against a group of wood traders who he alleges beat him up on Tuesday. According to [Krouch] Non [Santre commune police chief], Nhok Yern, a reporter for Prum Bayon newspaper, and another journalist confronted men trafficking wood by cart. ...

The government has informed foreign embassies in the country that the opposition’s threatened demonstrations over the election results are intended to illegally overthrow the elected CPP-led government, a ministry spokesman said Wednesday. Lieutenant General Khieu Sopheak, spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, said that letters were ...

Acting on the orders of the Constitutional Council, the National Election Committee yesterday opened the packages containing ballots and original documents used to tally votes from eight Battambang province polling stations. In contrast to a similar examination of 13 “Safety Packages A” from Kratie on Sunday ...

Stocks at the National Blood Transfusion Center (NBTC) are critically low and hundreds of units short of meeting demand, leading management at the center to publicly appeal for people to come forward and help restore the depleted reserves. Dr. Hok Kim Cheng, the NBTC’s director, said ...

For the second time in as many weeks, an NGO has accused tycoon Try Pheap of facilitating illegal logging in a protected forest during the election campaign and post-election period, and with the protection of authorities. In a report set to be released today by the ...

A Cambodian provincial court today dropped charges against a military police officer and his wife accused of murdering a reporter investigating the country’s illegal timber trade, drawing protests from the journalist’s wife and from human rights and environmental advocacy groups. Hang Serei Oudom, a ...

The Ministry of Education on Tuesday again publicly accused the Ministry of Finance of not injecting enough funds into the education sector in order to bring Cambodia in line with the rest of Southeast Asia. Speaking at the close of a two-day workshop to formulate the ...

A verdict in the brutal slaying last year of an investigative journalist in Ratanakkiri province is due to be handed down by the provincial court today following a reinvestigation into the case. Hang Serei Odom, 42, a reporter for the Virakchun Khmer Daily, was found hacked ...

Cambodia’s Independent Civil Servants Association (CICA) has written to the minister of education to request teachers and education officials be given equal access to an exam allowing them to move up the ministry’s pay scale. The association claims the ministry has made recent changes to a ...

Cambodia reported 74 landmine casualties in the first seven months of this year, down 36 percent from the 115 casualties over the same period last year, the figures of the Cambodia Mine Action Center (CMAC) said Tuesday. During the January-July period this year, 12 people were ...

Legalisation of same-sex marriage, comprehensive sex education and non-discriminatory guidelines for health workers treating LGBT people and those living with HIV/AIDS are among a handful of ways to bolster human rights in Cambodia, according to a submission delivered to the United Nations ahead of the ...

More than half a million dollars in bribes were paid to teachers during last month’s national exams by high school students in Phnom Penh alone, the authors of a new study have found. The study, conducted by the Youth Resource Development Program, found that the average ...