Government

Two land activists from forced evictions in Phnom Penh will not be released on bail as they await trial on incitement charges widely seen as an attack on free speech. The two women, Yorm Bopha and Tim Sak Mony, were arrested in early September and accused ...

Twelve families from Koh Kong province on Nov. 6  filed a complaint with Prime Minister Hun Sen’s youth volunteers and the Department of Land Management, requesting assistance in a land dispute with businessman, Heng Huy. Pok Yon, the families’ representative, said that earlier this year, Heng ...

More than 100 moto-taxi and tuk tuk drivers who are part of a little-known workers union submitted a letter to the U.S. Embassy and the European Union Delegation yesterday, asking them not to intervene in the case of Boeng Kak activist Yorm Bopha. It is not ...

The Anti-Corruption Unit has arrested a military police officer accused of involvement in an illegal luxury timber racket in Pursat province’s Krakor district – an area where government investigators conceded that complicity by the powerful was rife. On Saturday, the anti-graft agency arrested military police officer ...

Two senior officials in Preah Vihear under investigation by the Anti-Corruption Unit have been removed from their posts, including a tax officer who it is alleged had gotten away without officially stamping tax forms for an entire year, the ACU announced on Friday “We found that ...

Improvements to Cambodia’s banking and finance sector are expected to come about as a result of the 2013 national budget, a Council of Ministers spokesman said. “We will dedicate resources to ensuring macro-economic stability,” spokesman for the Council of Ministers, Phay Siphan said. These measures, in conjunction ...

The European Parliament, representing one of the country’s largest donors, on Friday called for a moratorium on forced evictions, an overhaul of elections and even went so far as to suggest to the European Union that it suspend tariff-free imports of agricultural goods linked to ...

The government has allocated more than $3 billion for total government spending in 2013, an increase of 19.2 percent on the $2.6 billion the government planned to spend in 2012, according to a statement issued by the Council of Ministers on Friday. The statement did not ...

On top of impressive growth, the Royal Government is opening the country to international investment As for mining: the country is now open for international business. The stable, democratic government passed anti-corruption laws in 2011 and has dedicated itself to working with private business The most active ...

As buyers for international clothing brands yesterday praised the renewal of an agreement aimed at reducing strikes in the garment sector, labor unions and factory owners said that only proper implementation would determine the agreement’s effectiveness. Modeled after an earlier pact from 2010 to prevent work ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday appeared to add his voice to the strong government reaction against criticism from U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi. Mr. Subedi last month delivered reports on human rights and economic land concessions in Cambodia to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. His ...

Hundreds of families living near Phnom Penh International Airport are facing imminent eviction from heir homes as security preparations begin for world leaders who will attend next month’s Asean and East Asia summits. A total of 387 families living on 6.3 hectares of land to the ...

New European legislation passed last month could help transparency in the extractive industries, by forcing companies to declare payments to foreign governments rich in resources For resource-rich countries like Cambodia, that means much more transparency, she said. More than 95 percent of the world’s major extractive ...

A UN envoy has called on the international community to pay more attention to human rights issues in Cambodia. The call comes amid ongoing land disputes and legal harassment of activists. Surya Subedi is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia and has submitted ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday that there was a lack of staff at the Ministry of Land Management, and suggested that the students in his land measuring program be utilized to rectify the shortage. Mr. Hun Sen made the comments while visiting Pursat province’s Phnom ...

Om Yentieng, president of the government’s Cambodian Human Rights Committee, yesterday accused U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi of pandering to the opposition party and trying to stifle the work of the national court system through his examination of Cambodia’s rights situation. Mr. Yentieng, who also heads the Anti-Corruption ...

Cambodia’s Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) has received about 800 corruption-related complaints in the first eight months of this year, exceeding the whole last year of only 700 cases, Om Yintieng, ACU’s Chairman, said Thursday Cambodia is riddled with bribery and corruption. The Government of Cambodia sees corruption ...

While protesters demonstrated outside, urging land and human-rights reform, members of the donor community met with the government yesterday at the Council for the Development of Cambodia in Phnom Penh to sign off on a series of development targets that bore only a faint resemblance to those ...

Economic land concessions (ELCs) benefit only a minority, the human rights consequences of the concessions are stark, and Cambodia’s sustainable economic development is threatened by the practice. U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi told the Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday. Mr. Subedi cited uneven access to ...

The Kandal Provincial Court on Friday tried a former provincial judge, Huoth Heang, and his clerk, Lim Kompheak, both of whom stand accused of corruption. On January 20, Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) officials arrested Judge Heang during a sting operation in which the judge was caught accepting a ...

An international rights group yesterday said the situation of human rights in Cambodia was continuing to worsen and accused the government of being “at war” with its own citizens over access to land. In its briefing paper, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) also said that Cambodia was ...

Residents of Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak and Borei Keila communities delivered petitions to the offices of the European Union and World Bank yesterday in their ongoing attempts to enlist Cambodia’s aid donors in their efforts to have jailed anti-eviction activists released from Prey Sar prison. ...

Increasing the tobacco retail tax — one of the world’s lowest at 10 per cent of unit price for domestically produced cigarettes — would deter smokers and increase government revenue while having minimal effect on tobacco producers, Ayda Yurekli, co-ordinator for the World Health Organization’s ...

With the deadline to pay annual property taxes rapidly approaching, hundreds of Phnom Penh homeowners queued this week at Canadia Bank’s headquarters on Monivong Boulevard to pay their tax bills in relative comfort, and avoid long visits to district and municipal taxation offices. Canadia Bank signed ...