Social development

About 100 monks, activists and workers returned on Saturday evening to the Canadia Industrial Park, where garment workers clashed with military police on January 3, to pray for the five protesters who were shot dead in the violence and call for the release of 23 ...

Opposition party members will lead a delegation to the doors of Kampong Cham Correctional Centre 3 on Tuesday in the hope of visiting the 23 people imprisoned there following a violent crackdown on striking garment workers in early January. Despite having previously been denied access to ...

A call for the Cambodian government to lift its controversial ban on public assembly is among 34 such recommendations it has chosen to defer in the wake of last week’s second Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of its human rights situation. The UN on Saturday released a ...

Villagers in Ratanakkiri’s Lumphat district have filed a complaint with rights group Adhoc, claiming their village chief has threatened them with arrest over a petition accusing officials of illegally logging a community forest. Sven Vev, 40, said he and three other representatives of the ethnic Tumpoun ...

Market vendors hawking pirated government textbooks have a month to get their shops in order if they want to avoid an authority-led crackdown, a statement released on Friday by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport warns. Selling or buying textbooks labelled “not for sale” or ...

The opposition party’s planned complaint to the International Criminal Court against government officials for long-term rights abuses will likely be beaten to the punch by a US lawyer and rights activist, Voice of America reported on Friday. According to VOA, Morton Sklar, executive director of the ...

The Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent US agency that oversees government-sponsored stations Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, has hit back after the Cambodian government accused the broadcasters of being tools of the opposition. In a statement released Thursday, BBG chair Jeffrey Shell rejected ...

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association will arrive in Cambodia on February 5, his office announced on Friday. ...

The Ministry of Health has moved to calm public fears over the safety of the measles and rubella (MR) vaccine, which was administered to 4.5 million Cambodian children in the last three months of 2013, as rumors circulate that it poses sinister health risks, according ...

The opposition CNRP’s deputy public affairs director, Kem Monovithya, posted a statement to her official Facebook account on Saturday distancing the party from Thy Sovantha, a 19-year-old opposition activist with a large social media following, announcing that Ms. Sovantha was “not involved” with the CNRP. Last ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen asked Britain to help Cambodia on human resource development. Hun Sen and Hugo Swire, British Foreign Minister for Asian Affairs, had a meeting Friday at the Peace Palace. ...

Sugar plantations that benefit from the European Union’s Everything But Arms (EBA) scheme, which allows preferential access to the E.U.’s market, have further impoverished Cambodia’s poor, and an investigation needs to be launched, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) said on Friday. Patrice Tirolien, MEP ...

As Buddhist monks across the country don saffron robes and leave pagodas in search of donations to fill alms bowls each morning, seven monks based in Dangkao district on the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh are thinking only of feeding the country’s growing appetite for ...

Two human rights groups on Friday appealed to Interior Minister Sar Kheng to intervene after the General Department of Prisons, which is part of the Interior Ministry, refused to allow representatives from their organizations to meet with some of the 23 union activists and protesters ...

Two years after Prime Minister Hun Sen broke ground on a Chinese-funded project to widen National Road 6a in order to expand its capacity as a major trade and tourism thoroughfare, life for the tens of thousands of families living along the 50-km stretch of ...

A member of the European Parliament is in Cambodia investigating agri-business firms accused of evicting hundreds of families while benefiting from a free-trade scheme with Europe worth millions of dollars, according to the NGO Equitable Cambodia. The visit from France’s Patrice Tirolien follows a resolution the ...

Authorities burned one house and demolished three others in the past two days in Koh Kong’s Botum Sakor and Kiri Sakor districts in the latest development in the long-running land dispute between villagers and Tianjin Union Development Group, community representatives and the rights group Adhoc ...

More than 40 fresh land rows have emerged across the country – and many more could be going unreported, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) said yesterday. A study CCHR conducted into land conflicts between 2011 and 2013 has resulted in the rights group publishing ...

Just weeks after the country’s only independent teachers’ association staged a strike for higher wages, Phnom Penh’s education chief told teachers this week that they must stop taking bribes to comply with the government’s promised reform agenda. Speaking to about 500 educators, mainly school directors, from ...

An outspoken CNRP youth activist who claims that her passport application was leaked by immigration police said Thursday that she will lead protests in front of the Ministry of Interior and Prime Minister Hun Sen’s residence in Phnom Penh if authorities do not attempt to ...

It started with a small, dark spot on Oeur Pisey’s left arm: A spot that he simply ignored. Slowly, other spots appeared. They soon covered Mr. Pisey’s thighs, upper body, and eventually, his face. A local health clinic in Kompong Cham province told him not to worry: ...

Five police from Phnom Penh’s Dangkor and Russey Keo districts could face charges for allegedly beating false confessions out of three suspects, a technique human rights observers say is pervasive in Cambodia. Judges and lawyers at Phnom Penh Municipal Court yesterday questioned the three Russey Keo ...

At least 41 new land disputes were reported in Cambodia last year despite a government moratorium on the widespread grant of so-called economic land concessions, a rights group said Thursday. The new cases in 17 locations—including the capital Phnom Penh—added to the 223 land conflicts previously ...

Cambodia is preparing three long-awaited laws aimed at restoring its widely criticized judicial system. However, two of the three draft laws obtained by VOA Khmer still need a lot more improvement, according to legal experts. The laws focus on codifying court jurisdiction, laying out guidelines for ...