Social development

Cambodia received roughly $4 billion in foreign direct investment last year—roughly the same amount as in 2013, the secretary-general of the Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC) said after a meeting with the National Assembly’s environment and rural development commission. ...

A mother whose daughter was trafficked into the Malaysian sex industry has pleaded with lawmakers to help rescue her child, as new figures from Cambodia’s Interior Ministry reveal an upswing in human trafficking victims rescued last year. According to the ministry, although sex trafficking cases ...

Outspoken environmental activist Alex Gonzalez-Davidson has been arrested by Interior Ministry officers and taken in an unmarked car to the Ministry of Interior, a rights group and witnesses have said. Cheang Sophos, a senior investigator for local rights group Licadho, said that Gonzalez-Davidson was arrested at ...

The government on Saturday announced a plan to decrease the number of maternal deaths in the Kingdom by 50 per cent in the future by promoting countrywide pregnancy-related preventative measures among women. In the recently released preliminary results of the 2014 Cambodia Demographic and Health ...

Drawing on the majority-Muslim nations of Indonesia and Malaysia as examples for Cambodia to emulate for better government, opposition leader Sam Rainsy led a group of lawmakers stumping for votes in Cham Muslim villages in Tbong Khmum province on Saturday. ...

The Phnom Penh Municipal Court has postponed today’s scheduled hearing of 11 people, including senior CNRP official Meach Sovannara, who were charged with insurrection and other crimes over a bloody scuffle at Phnom Penh’s Freedom Park in July. ...

The parents of a man who died at the Svay Rieng provincial referral hospital of wounds sustained in a motorbike crash say their son might have survived if doctors had not been absent from work celebrating Chinese New Year, and are planning to file a ...

Dismissing a recent report showing a sharp increase in land disputes, the government has said such conflicts are in fact decreasing and formally called on rights group Licadho to release its findings. Licadho reported last week that it recorded about three times as many new land ...

An immigration official said Sunday that his department would wait for orders before moving to deport environmental activist Alex Gonzalez-Davidson, whose visa the government refused to renew after it expired Friday. ...

fter rights group Licadho released a statement Thursday saying that more than 10,000 Cambodian families were newly affected last year by land disputes in the 13 provinces where it has monitors—a three-fold increase from 2013—a government spokesman on Friday slammed the NGO’s report as “baseless ...

The ruling CPP, which has long used election-time generosity as a central campaign strategy, proposed a rule that would ban vote-buying on Friday during ongoing bipartisan talks to write a new election law. ...

Seven giant puppets in the shapes of endangered animal species will snake their way through Siem Reap City Saturday night, carried by the 500 children who created them as part of a program that mixed art and the environment. ...

The number of families newly affected by land disputes last year was three times that of 2013, according to figures documented by local rights group Licadho. In a statement released yesterday, the group “strongly expresse[d] its concern” at the surge in disputes, noting that in 2014 ...

Three mothers say they fear their sons are being coerced into fabricating molestation accusations against a man they know as the patron saint of Phnom Penh’s riverside but who police and child-protection activists say is a predator. ...

Almost 450 people were rounded up from the capital’s streets last year and sent to the notorious Prey Speu social affairs centre, where in November a man died after being denied medical treatment, according to an annual report from Phnom Penh’s Social Affairs Department. ...

About 50 of Phnom Penh’s 270 gardeners gathered at the National Assembly and then City Hall on Monday morning to deliver petitions asking for a substantial raise to their modest monthly salaries, threatening to go on strike if they were denied. ...

Local officials in Ratanakkiri province are actively preventing a team of U.N. workers in the area from making any attempt to reach nearly 40 Montagnard asylum seekers now hiding in the province. ...

A surge in land disputes in Cambodia affected more than three times as many families last year as in 2013, a local rights group said Thursday, urging Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government to address the issue with “long-term lasting solutions” instead of making empty promises. Rights ...

A new group of six Montagnards from Vietnam have arrived in northeastern Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province to seek political refuge, as a United Nations team tries to locate and assist other refugees in hiding, a villager who provided shelter to the Montagnards said. The villager, who declined ...

Three of the country’s largest unions on Wednesday added their voices to a global campaign urging member states of the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Governing Body, which Cambodia recently joined, to not revoke the option to go on strike as a fundamental right. ...

Thailand’s army has asked Cambodia “not to jump [to] the conclusion” that its soldiers were to blame for the deaths of three Cambodian loggers who were shot dead earlier this month while searching for rosewood across the border, according to Thai media. ...

The Kingdom has seen vast improvements in nutrition, general health and mortality rates over the past four years, according to the preliminary results of the fourth Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey (CDHS) released yesterday. ...

Plans to bring the raucous 10-day rave Kazantip to Cambodian shores were in tatters Wednesday as hundreds of Russian revelers showed up at the bridge leading to Koh Puos island to find the way blocked by a 2-meter-high metal barricade. ...

Nearly two-thirds of surveyed survivors of human trafficking in Southeast Asia show symptoms of depression, while another 40 per cent suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a new study. ...