Social development

LAST week marked the arrival and passing of 12/12/12, the Cambodian government’s original date for the commencement of oil extraction from the Block A oilfields in the Gulf of Thailand, with no activity on the site. Chevron currently holds a 30 per cent interest in the ...

Sixty families in Kompong Cham province’s Krathor district are planning to file a complaint with provincial authorities after local land management officials decided to take away their registration documents for land titles under Prime Minister Hun Sen’s recently launched titling program. Pon Pumm, 44 a farmer, ...

The Government of Cambodia on Friday passed a draft law on fire prevention in order to contribute to maintaining security, social safety, public order, and life and property protection, according to a media statement released after the weekly Cabinet meeting. In the meeting, Hun Sen ...

More than 250 ethnic Jarai families living in Ratanakkiri province’s O’Yadaw district filed a complaint with rights group Adhoc yesterday, after local officials demanded that the villagers apply for private land titles to protect their property from two Vietnamese rubber companies currently clearing their land, ...

The United Nations Development Program and Cambodian Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy on Thursday jointly held a workshop on Sustainable Energy for All ( SE4All) in order to discuss the future of sustainable energy in Cambodia. The workshop, opened by Suy Sem, Minister of Industry, ...

Canadian funding for ethnic minority communities in the process of applying for communal land titles will run out in March, and other donors have not yet signed up to take over the task, officials from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which currently provides the ...

The court system is still “chronically underfunded” and laws on its management are almost 20 years overdue, the U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi said yesterday. One year ago, during his sixth mission to Cambodia, Mr. Subedi described reform in the courts as moving at a ...

A final report from Thailand’s human rights commission on the alleged rights violations of a Thai company involved in two Cambodian sugar plantations is expected by late January, a member of the commission said. In July, the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand said its investigation ...

The European Union’s ambassador to Cambodia yesterday urged the government to heed the advice of the U.N.’s visiting human rights envoy, who has come under increasing rebuke from officials for his unflattering reports. Addressing a crowd of about 3,000, mostly garment factory workers, at Phnom Penh’s ...

Economic land concessions granted to a pair of Vietnamese companies in Ratanakkiri’s O’Yadav district were endangering the traditional lifestyles of as many as 200 ethnic-minority families, villagerstold the Post yesterday. As the companies actively cleared forest to make room for the eventual rubber plantations, the government ...

More than 700,000 workers at private companies and factories across 19 provinces have registered to join a nationwide pension scheme that goes into effect in 2015, Labour Ministry officials told the Post yesterday. A branch of the National Social Security Fund (NSFF), the pension scheme was ...

U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi, who arrived in Cambodia Sunday on a five-day mission, spent yesterday, International Human Rights Day, in Kompong Chhnang province with about 300 villagers from a community embroiled in a long-running land dispute with the wife of a government minister. James ...

On the second day of his two-day visit to Ratanakkiri, Prime Minister Hun Sen on Friday cajoled indigenous minority members about their ready adoption of new technology amid the shift away from traditional ways of life, and extolled the benefits of rubber plantations over their ...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen mocked a group of ethnic minority villagers who tried to petition him on Friday about their land dispute in northern Cambodia’s Rattanakiri province, after they were stopped from presenting their complaint during his visit on a land-titling campaign. Hun Sen was ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Friday distributed 541 land titles covering 1,308 hectares to 301 mostly ethnic minority families in Andong Meas district. ...

Cambodia on Thursday inaugurated a China-funded national road No. 78 in the country’s northeastern provinces, which is expected to contribute to developing economy and poverty reduction. The 121-kilometer road, extending from Ratanakiri province to Stung Treng province, was built by China’s Shanghai Construction ( Group) General ...

WASHINGTON DC – Seven opposition lawmakers say they have found new ways to reduce the national debt and are requesting that the National Assembly’s finance committee meet with them before drafting the 2013 national budget. The lawmakers, from the Sam Rainsy and Human Rights parties, say ...

The Garment Manufacturer’s Association in Cambodia (GMAC) signed a $3.5 million loan agreement with French international development agency Agence Francaise de Development (AFD) yesterday to build Cambodia’s first garment sector training school. The school will train Cambodia’s unskilled garment workers and other Cambodians who wish to ...

Malaysian authorities have freed 105 mostly Indonesian maids who were forced to work without pay by day and held against their will at night, local media reported on Monday. The women were freed Saturday in a raid on a building near the capital Kuala Lumpur where ...

Cambodia on Monday recorded 162 landmine casualties in the first ten months of this year, down 4 percent from 155 casualties at the same period last year, showed a report from the Cambodian Mine and Explosive Remnants of War Victim Information System. The report said that ...

Local authorities have stepped in to halt construction around a disputed land concession in Ratanakkiri province in an attempt to discover whether the company has the right to clear forest that residents claim they depend on to survive. In what appears to be a rare showing ...

Following our investigation which highlighted allegations of human rights abuses in Cambodia’s sugar industry, activists are stepping up their campaign against sugar companies buying from the region. The call to boycott sugar company Tate and Lyle over allegations of illegal land seizures and human rights ...

Until the arrival of large-scale development around her home in the northeastern province of Ratanakkiri, Sav Samourn, a member of the ethnic Jarai minority, was frightened of wild animals and ghosts. But as trees disappeared and industrial machinery razed the forestland, the old fears fell away. ...

Though they held out hope for years that they would get communal land titles, hundreds of ethnic minority families in Mondolkiri and Ratanakkiri provinces have now opted to accept individual private land titles under Prime Minister Hun Sen’s new titling scheme. While individual titles offer immediate ...