News

The government has slashed about 250,000 hectares of land from 79 economic land concessions (ELCs), forest concessions and wildlife protection concessions and will return it, replete with land titles, to “poor people”, January’s Royal Book says. The publication, issued on January 17 and obtained yesterday, says ...

Cambodia has asked India to provide more assistance in the development of human resources to promote economic growth and enhance bilateral co-operation. Deputy Prime Minister Sok An made the request during a meeting with Indian human resource development minister Mangapati Pallam Raju in Phnom Penh on ...

Thousands of villagers who will lose their land to the construction of the Lower Sesan 2 dam in Stung Treng province later this year have not been told of the government’s plans for their resettlement and compensation, a new study released yesterday shows. Through interviews with ...

More than 200 people were arrested while defending their land in 2012 – a year human rights groups described yesterday as Cambodia’s “worst” for land disputes. Of the 201 people arrested – a figure that more than doubled the 2011 total – 29 were imprisoned, mostly ...

Members of the Prey Lang Community Network yesterday called on the government to approve a forest preservation sub-decree that has been in draft form since 2011. Hoeun Sopheap, representative of the Kampong Thom provincial Prey Lang community, said the sub-decree would help protect the biodiversity of ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday ordered officials to take action against unnamed companies he said were using the cover of night to illegally dredge sand from the Mekong River. Calling on Water Resources and Meteorology Minister Lim Kean Hor to lead the crackdown, Hun Sen also ...

New scheduled flights between Sihanoukville and Phnom Penh will probably be launched soon, and Sihanoukville-Siem Reap flights will operate daily instead of three times a week, an industry leader says. These changes by Cambodia Angkor Air had a “high chance” of taking off in April to ...

The government has approved more than $4 billion of investment in the public sector over the next three years in a bid to stimulate economic growth, the council of ministers said in a statement obtained yesterday. “The rolling plan will focus om four main sectors” ...

More than 8,000 hectares of land was cut from economic and forest land concessions owned by some of the country’s biggest tycoons and awarded to villagers last month, according to documents from the Council of Ministers. Four sub-decrees signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen order that ...

An assistant to former US president Bill Clinton said Cambodia has many potential areas for foreign direct investment (FDI) from many countries, including the US. Karen Tramontano, founder, along with Clinton, and president of the Global Fairness Initiative and CEO at Blue Star Strategies, met with ...

The national flag carrier, Cambodia Angkor Air (CAA), added a new passenger plane on Sunday in order to expand new flight destinations to countries in the region, said a senior government official. “The new Airbus 321 plane is leased from an Airbus manufacturer in France,” Tek ...

The successful hosting of the 21st Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its related summits here in November was definitely the biggest achievement of Cambodia in 2012 despite some sad events such as the death of the venerated former King Norodom ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday appealed to the private sector for the second time to invest in fire trucks instead of depending on the government’s fire departments. “Please try to do two jobs. The first is to get the fire sprinkler systems into the factory ...

Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister yesterday reiterated his commitment to criminalising money laundering and terrorist financing in the Kingdom. Sok An reassured delegates at the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on Money Laundering of Cambodia’s commitment to implementing comprehensive procedures to stop illegal monetary transactions. ...

There was so much noise blasting from the loudspeakers that the occasional rallying cry from striking workers at the demonstration in Phnom Penh’s Dangkao district last week could hardly be heard. One 2-meter high stack of amplifiers had been set up outside the Nex-T factory and ...

The court system is still “chronically underfunded” and laws on its management are almost 20 years overdue, the U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi said yesterday. One year ago, during his sixth mission to Cambodia, Mr. Subedi described reform in the courts as moving at a ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday said that Cambodia’s budget for next year was balanced, claiming that a planned increase in public spending will be made up for by a rise in government revenue. Despite concerns from the opposition that foreign borrowing should be reduced, the National ...

U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi, who arrived in Cambodia Sunday on a five-day mission, spent yesterday, International Human Rights Day, in Kompong Chhnang province with about 300 villagers from a community embroiled in a long-running land dispute with the wife of a government minister. James ...

The government is beset with high-level corruption, a lack of transparency in public procurements, poor auditing practices and political interference in the country’s main anti-corruption body, a report produced by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) sent to the media yesterday states. In a 66-page report that ...

Eight representatives of Phnom Penh communities involved in land disputes were allowed to present their petitions to the Council of Ministers yesterday after authorities blocked about 200 of their fellow petitioners from gathering in front of the Peace Palace. During a meeting with the representatives, Bun ...

About 50 Boeng Kak residents protested outside Prime Minister Hun Sne’s Peace Palace yesterday and submitted a petition to the Council of Minister asking for land titles in their long-running dispute with a company part-owned by CPP senator Lao Meng Khin. ...

Rights groups said they will continue to advocate in land grabbing and eviction cases, and villagers involved in such disputes said they will continue to turn to NGOs for help despite a warning by Prime Minister Hun Sen for civil society to stay clear of ...

Only about 5 percent of the roughly 2,000 major development projects, such as dams, roads and bridges, approved by the government between 2004 and 2011 carried out environmental impact assessments, an official at the ministry of Environment said yesterday. Speaking at a workshop in Phnom Penh ...

More studies should be conducted on the controversial Lower Sesan 2 dam in Stung Treng province in order to understand its potential social and environmental effects, Conservation International (C.I.) said in a statement. The Lower Sesan 2-as well as other dams planned for the Sesan, Srepok ...