Law and judiciary

A Phnom Penh Municipal judge yesterday sentenced a former military officer to 10 years for drug trafficking and running an illicit lottery, while his niece received a one-year suspended sentence for her role. ...

Mark Harmon, the Khmer Rouge tribunal’s international co-investigating judge, announced Tuesday that he was stepping down from his position following almost a year of inaction by judicial police in executing arrest warrants in two government-opposed cases. ...

In a rare show of discord inside the courts, a prosecutor at the Kandal Provincial Court on Tuesday lodged an appeal against verdicts handed down to two men involved in a kidnapping and murder. ...

Cambodia’s opposition party will boycott a national conference held by parliament to discuss a controversial draft law that would regulate nongovernmental organizations operating in the developing country, because of loopholes in the proposed legislation that would hinder the groups, an opposition lawmaker said Tuesday. ...

Two opposition CNRP activists were arrested Monday and charged with inciting a brawl in Siem Reap province last month during which a man suffered a serious stab wound, police said. ...

Lawmakers yesterday passed a rent control law for low-income earners and students, prohibiting landlords from increasing rent for two years once a contract is signed and allowing tenants to scrap a lease agreement without notice. The law, which sailed through the National Assembly with 102 of ...

A second arrest warrant for former Khmer Rouge navy commander Meas Muth was ignored by judicial police last month, a declassified document released Monday by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia shows. ...

Phen Bunthoeun, the NGO director who was arrested and detained overnight by Vietnamese authorities for leading about 40 students to visit a disputed border area in Svay Rieng province on Saturday, admitted Monday that he had gone there to inspect alleged border violations. ...

A Cambodian NGO director who on Saturday took about 40 of his primary- and high-school students on a trip to a disputed border area in Svay Rieng province was beaten by Vietnamese civilians and imprisoned overnight, officials said Sunday. ...

Police in southern Vietnam seized 387 kilograms of elephant tusks last week after the ivory passed through the Prek Chak international border checkpoint in Kampot province, the state-run Viet Nam News newspaper reported Friday. ...

Chan Vichet, a representative of the former Dey Krahorm community, whose homes were bulldozed in 2009 to make way for development in Phnom Penh, was acquitted on Friday of defamation and forgery charges brought against him in 2005 by fellow evictees. ...

Warnings from civil society groups that they will urge citizens to vote against any politician who supports the draft law on associations and NGOs have drawn a stern rebuke from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party. ...

Two Chinese tourists were arrested in Phnom Penh on Saturday for using a drone to film the Royal Palace, but were released with a warning Sunday, according to a senior police official. ...

A man who entered a Phnom Penh high school and slapped a teenager who had been fighting with his daughter told the municipal court on Friday that he was mentally ill and had lied about working at the Council of Minis­ters, hoping it would protect ...

Local officials apologized yesterday to the Vietnamese owners of a rubber plantation in this northwestern province, after a dispute with local residents spiraled out of control a day earlier with angry villagers setting a company building aflame.  ...

Anti-drug police on Saturday arrested 20 young people for smoking shisha at a karaoke parlor in Phnom Penh’s Meanchey district, officials said Sunday. ...

The Appeal Court on Friday upheld a Phnom Penh Municipal Court decision to throw out the case of an NGO staffer who claims his life was threatened by security guards working for property magnate Khun Sear at a disputed site in Tuol Kok district. ...

Cambodian-American businessman Richer San, one of four men accused of defrauding a Phnom Penh dentist of $1 million, sat alone at the stand in the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Friday as lawyers delivered their closing arguments. ...

The human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Licado and Adhoc both say they will not attend Wednesday’s consultation workshop on the controversial draft Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organizations (LANGO) hosted by the National Assembly. ...

A popular chief monk who was found dead on Monday at his pagoda in Kompong Speu province committed suicide after becoming overburdened by debt from a road construction project he had undertaken, a police official and senior monk said Thursday. ...

Two days after a platoon leader in Mondolkiri accused soldiers from Kratie of pointing their weapons at his men in order to free a group of suspected illegal loggers from Vietnam, two of the military’s most senior officials on Thursday said they were unaware of ...

Forestry officials in Oddar Meanchey province on Wednesday discovered a timber processing plant and thousands of lengths of luxury-grade wood in a remote forested area populated only by soldiers, officials said Thursday. ...

Seventeen young people were charged by the Phnom Penh Municipal Court and released on bail yesterday after they were caught allegedly falsifying documents while taking a Korean language test administered as a precursor to working in South Korea, police said.​ ...

A Council of Ministers official was arrested in Phnom Penh on Wednesday after he showed up at his daughter’s high school and slapped her classmate following a fight between the two teenagers, police and witnesses said Thursday. ...