Social development

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 ...

A new made-service company that claims to be the only one of its kind in Cambodia is offering an alternative employment option for the country’s many domestic workers who face insecure, and often abusive, workplace conditions overseas. Ming Hour Home Service, which opened in July, employs ...

Meas Bopha, 47, sits in an outdoor pagoda over a lotus-filled pond on her property in Kampong Speu, home to 10 of her 12 children, and wipes back tears as she talks about her missing teenage daughter, Bophea, who vanished one morning last week. Bophea ...

A majority of small and medium enterprises in Cambodia were not registered, despite the advantages it offered to businesses, participants at a workshop on business registration procedure, intellectual property and business etiquette for women heard yesterday. Referring to 2011 statistics, Chan Sorey, vice-minister of the Ministry ...

The Ratanakkiri Provincial Court yesterday questioned the first of two human rights workers who are suing local officials for allegedly disrupting a July meeting they were hosting for villagers in Lumphat district. Deputy court prosecutor Ros Saram said he questioned Chhim Savuth, program officer for the ...

Cambodia has made almost no progress over the past six years when it comes to gender equality, and is still the lowest-ranked country in the region, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Gender Gap Index. Ranked 103 out of 135 countries surveyed, Cambodia placed last ...

The owner of a labor firm repeatedly accused of human trafficking, who is also the sister of one of the country’s top police officials, has been appointed head of the Association of Cambodian Recruitment Agencies (ACRA). Grave concerns have been expressed by rights groups over the appointment of Ung Seang ...

Government-issued economic land concessions are making the country’s indigenous communities in the northeast provinces worse off, according to a study by the Mekong Institute of Cambodia. Presented yesterday at the 2012 Development Research Forum in Phnom Penh, the study comes on top of mounting criticism of ...

In a rare intervention, the Thai Labor Ministry has stepped in to stop the exploitation of migrant workers from Cambodia and Myanmar at a seafood factory in the country’s south, correspondence obtained by the Post reveals. The ministry found the Phatthana Seafood factory, in Songkhla province, which employs ...

The Koh Kong Provincial Court yesterday convicted a private security guard of accidentally killing the military police officer who allegedly shot dead the country’s most prominent environmental activist, Chut Wutty, and sentenced him to two years in prison. The presiding judge, Kham Sophary, then immediately suspended ...

Time is running out to rid the proposed ASEAN Human Rights Declaration of clauses that would restrict peoples’ rights rather than protect and enhance them, civil society groups said yesterday. Nay Vanda, deputy head of the monitoring section of rights group Adhoc, said civil society groups needed more ...

Less than a month before Asean heads of state are expected to approve the first-ever human rights declaration for the regional group, Cambodian and Indonesian NGOs yesterday urged member states to give their organizations a larger role in the process. In the works for more than ...

The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) issued a statement on Friday praising the U.N. General Assembly for not voting in favor of Cambodia during its bid for a non-permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. U.N. member states cast their votes on Thursday in ...

Police targeting of sex workers for arrest has made them vulnerable to contracting or spreading HIV, according to a U.N. report released yesterday. The U.N. report, Sex Work and Law in Asia and the Pacific-Laws, HIV and human rights in the context of sex work, states that ...

The Ratanakkiri Provincial Court has summoned for questioning two human rights workers who have lodged court complaints against local officials for disrupting their land-rights workshop in July. Pen Bonnar, provincial coordinator for Adhoc, and Chhim Savuth, a project coordinator for the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR), filed ...

The U.N. General Assembly’s vote for the Asia-Pacific non-permanent seat on the Security Council went to the wire yesterday night, as a second ballot had to be held when none of the contenders, Cambodia, South Korea and Buthan, won a clear two-thirds majority. After the ...

A Ratanakkiri-based human rights worker charged by the Ratanakkiri Provincial Court with inciting ethnic minority villagers to protest during a 2009 land dispute with a private agro-industry company has been transferred to work in Phnom Penh. Pen Bonnar, Ratanakkiri provincial coordinator for Adhoc , said yesterday ...

After calls from their lawyers late last month to speed up the appeals process, three former advisers to Senate President Chea Sim convicted of fraud last year will appear before the Appeals Court on November 7, court deputy prosecutor Tan Senarong said yesterday. The three defendants ...

Cambodia lacks the resources for implementing intellectual property rights, while relevant officers lack skills to monitor the import of counterfeit products, according to an official. Var Roth San, Head of the Secretariat of National Committee for Intellectual Property Rights (NCIPR) and Director of  the Department of  ...

Journalists, NGO workers and politicians are not immune to the long arm of the law if they flout it, Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday as he distributed land titles in Kampot province. Mr. Hun Sen’s comments come 10 days after independent radio station owner Mam ...

The Ratanakkiri Provincial Court questioned two well-known human rights workers yesterday in an incitement lawsuit brought against them by a CPP commune chief, one of those questioned said. About 200 ethnic minority Tumpuon villagers, embroiled in a land dispute with the DM Group rubber company, protested ...

Land governance policies in Asia, especially concessions made to private companies, are leaving the region’s poorest vulnerable to human rights abuses, experts say. “Land-grabbing by the rich and powerful continues,” Suson Bunsak, executive secretary of the Cambodian Human Rights Action Committee, said at the recent Asia ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen again addressed recent criticism from [Surya Subedi] the U.N.’s human rights envoy to Cambodia , during a speech yesterday in Bateay Meanchey province that focused on land disputes. Mr. Hun Sen was speaking in Thma Puok district’s Banteay Chhmar commune, where he ...

Four years after they began fighting the well-connected concessionaire DM Group, members of the ethnic Tampuon who remain in Svay Sor village are exhausted. While the DM Group has seen its complaints against villagers and activists routinely heard at court, those filed by the affected families ...