Law and judiciary

Representatives from 25 trade unions Monday sent a request to the Ministry of Labor seeking several changes to a controversial draft union law and asking that a new $160 monthly minimum wage for the country’s volatile garment sector take effect in October. Garment factory owners say ...

Phnom Penh governor Pa Socheatvong on Monday slammed municipal waste disposal company Cintri for its poor performance in collecting the city’s garbage after a strike by trash collectors last week once again left the streets a mess. Cintri’s trash collectors ended their second strike of the ...

Employees of the Ocean Garment factory in Phnom Penh’s Pur Senchey district continued to protest Monday against management’s decision to ignore an Arbitration Council ruling on owed wages. Cheng Chhorn, secretary general of the Collective Union of Movement of Workers, said the workers will march to ...

A group of civil society organizations will petition King Norodom Sihamoni today, calling on the king to withhold his signature from three judicial laws that they say will entrench the ruling CPP’s control of the courts and jeopardize citizens’ constitutional freedoms. Despite concern raised by local ...

Australians are among donors to a school charity in Cambodia where the director has been charged with arranging for foreign volunteers to sexually abuse teenage students. The scandal has focused new attention on the management of Cambodia’s orphanages and children’s charities and the deception used by ...

A Mondulkiri military police officer has been charged with intentional murder after allegedly shooting and killing a man who ignored an order to stop his car while passing through a protected forest in the province’s O’Raing district, Mondulkiri provincial prosecutor Khout Sopheang said yesterday. ...

In the predawn hours of May 6, a flatbed truck packed with lengths of illegally logged timber sped past a checkpoint in Ratanakkiri province, knocking aside a police car and racing off. Police later tracked down the truck to a house in Banlung City. In the ...

A glass-manufacturing tycoon on Saturday threatened to shoot dead two local journalists as they were covering a dispute he was having with another businessman in Phnom Penh, according to a report posted on the National Police website. The journalists, from Cambodia Express News and Bayon TV, ...

A company owned by the wife of Mines and Energy Minister Suy Sem forged ahead with its construction of a concrete wall around a swath of disputed land in Kompong Chhnang province Friday, despite a call from the U.N.’s human rights envoy on Thursday that ...

More than a year after it was established, the National Commercial Arbitration Centre (NCAC), Cambodia’s first third-party dispute resolution body, is finally ready to take on its first case. During its first annual assembly in Phnom Penh on Friday, the NCAC confirmed that it had finalised ...

Elected opposition lawmakers will today call on Interior Minister Sar Kheng to lift the ban on gatherings at Freedom Park and release the results of a government investigation into deadly violence at a garment protest in early January. ...

Authorities in Kompong Thom province are searching for a soldier suspected of smuggling rosewood who shot at police while making his getaway through a maze of narrow streets on Saturday morning. Provincial police chief Chou Sam An said his officers received a call from a deputy ...

Mondolkiri Provincial Court charged a national police officer with intentional killing on Friday, the latest in an increasing trend of violent disputes over timber in the restive province. Pheng Sokheng, who was sent to the Seima Protected Forest to stifle the work of illegal loggers, on ...

Nearly four years after it was established by the Commerce Ministry and one year on from its official launch, the National Commercial Arbitration Center (NCAC) held its first annual assembly Friday. The NCAC was set up in 2010 to provide businesses with an alternative to the ...

Thailand’s military coup has reoriented Thai-Cambodian relations with surprising effects. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s overt enmity and confrontation towards Thailand over the past several years have become conciliatory and accommodating for the time being. Whether this new pattern of bilateral ties is solidified depends ...

United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights Surya Subedi has called on politically connected development company KDC International to halt its project in Kampong Chhnang province. Following violent clashes between KDC security guards and protesters on Monday, Subedi released a statement yesterday that calls on all ...

A large group of Cambodian migrants were rounded up and detained in a Bangkok prison at the end of May, where many still remain, Thai officials told the Post yesterday. Separate unconfirmed reports that at least 130 Cambodians had been in detention for more than a month emerged ...

A military police officer has been arrested and will be sent to court, while two others remain under questioning, after an unarmed man was shot dead on Wednesday night while travelling in a car through protected forest in Mondulkiri’s O’Raing district, officials said. Two military police ...

Rival factions in the increasingly bitter dispute over land in Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak neighborhood filed lawsuits against each other at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court yesterday over a clash late last month. The two sides, in what once was a unified front against the neighborhood’s ...

A Phnom Penh court on Thursday agreed to a prosecution request to consider filing more serious charges against a U.S.-based Cambodia dissident Sourn Serey Ratha accused of instigating an armed revolt against Prime Minister Hun Sen. Sourn Serey Ratha, who leads the Khmer People Power Movement ...

Danet* is fourteen, and lives in a house built on wooden stilts, with no walls, and only tarpaulin for shelter. The ‘virginity trade’ is rampant in Cambodia, particularly in the capital, and is “a big problem”, says Tim Huon from Action Pour Les Enfants (APLE), ...

A Cambodian school director has been arrested for trafficking teenage students to have sex with foreign donors, police say. Waha Long, the 32-year-old founder of the Underprivileged Children School in the northwestern tourist hub of Siem Reap, could face up to five years in jail if ...

Cambodia’s Constitutional Council has approved three controversial draft laws on judicial reform, despite heavy opposition from rights groups and international observers who say they will not restore the public’s faith in the courts. Critics say the laws—passed without opposition members in the National Assembly—put too much ...

More than a hundred monks and students from Vietnam’s Khmer Krom ethnic minority living in Cambodia clashed Tuesday with riot police and security guards in front of the Vietnamese embassy in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh as they marched to demand an apology for statements by ...