News

Officials from the ministries of interior, social affairs, and justice met with NGOs on Friday to discuss the latest draft of a juvenile justice law that has been in the works for more than a decade and which would mean young offenders’ rights would be ...

A request has been sent to the government’s Human Rights Committee and the interior and foreign affairs ministries seeking clarification on the status and whereabouts of a draft law that will govern associations and non-governmental organizations, asking to see the latest version of the law ...

The Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a joint memo yesterday advising recipients to take measures to ban smoking in public places. The “circular” is the first of its kind in Cambodia, and is to be distributed by all government ministries in ...

“What law? No one has ever come to speak to me about that,” said 33-year-old Lim Vannak, scanning the large plastic buckets of corrosive acids she had lined up on the pavement of Phnom Penh’s Street 144 on a recent morning. Acid in the wrong hands ...

The U.N. special rapporteur on the freedom of peaceful assembly and association, Maina Kiai, began a three-day unofficial visit to Cambodia on Wednesday, just one month after military police shot dead five protesters in Phnom Penh and the government imposed a ban on public gatherings. Mr. ...

Meeting for a minimum wage workshop on Tuesday, the country’s independent and government-aligned unions argued over reforms to the Labor Advisory Committee (LAC), the body in charge of setting the minimum wage in the garment sector, which employs some 600,000 workers. The LAC, which is composed ...

Discussions about salaries on the factory floor led worker Channa, 22, to begin feeling jealous of her male counterparts. She learned, through talking with a number of co-workers, that the men working around her were doing the same amount of work as she was, but being ...

The U.N.’s General Assembly released its latest round of recommendations to improve the human rights situation in Cambodia on Thursday following a review held last week in Geneva. The statements made by delegations from 76 countries during the review urged Cambodia to fulfill its promise to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Wednesday laid out more details in his plan to introduce a series of political reforms after a narrow win for his long-ruling CPP at the polls in July, including creating a new national working group and establishing public forums to ...

A newly demarcated wildlife and forest protection zone designed to safeguard Cambodia’s national bird, the giant ibis, along with a number of other endangered species, has been approved after more than 10 years in the making. A government sub-decree approving a protection zone spanning 66,932 hectares ...

Amnesty International and rights group Licadho in a joint statement yesterday called on UN member states to “address the country’s human rights crisis” at a UN Human Rights Council hearing in Geneva on Tuesday. The statement, which was sent to foreign embassies, the Cambodian government and ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has announced he will preside over a review of the government’s reform program. “[Hun Sen] announced that on January 29 he will preside over a wide-ranging meeting at the Peace Palace in order to evaluate and boost reform programs, especially economic reform ...

About 150 members of the former Dey Krahorm community in Phnom Penh’s Chamkar Mon district marked the fifth anniversary on Friday of the day mechanical excavators, security guards and authorities destroyed their homes to make room for a real estate project. Much like on past anniversaries, ...

Chinese New Year is coming and crowds of uniformed police, military police, soldiers and even the stony-faced troops of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Bodyguard Unit will be queuing with expectation at the gates of the rich and powerful to receive their annual “ang pao” envelopes. In ...

In the latest move to assert control over Cambodia’s saturated telecommunications industry and maintain tighter oversight, the Telecommunication Regulator of Cambodia (TRC) last week called for all industry providers to give proof of operations in a bid to snuff out inactive firms and reclaim wasted ...

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday signed a spending bill that suspends some funding to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government until an independent investigation into last year’s disputed national election is carried out, or until the opposition CNRP ends its boycott of parliament. The bill targets ...

In a meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen and 10 of the government’s highest-ranking officials in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi called for the perpetrators of recent state-sanctioned killings to be held accountable for their actions. Mr. Subedi spent three-and-a-half hours ...

As military police began a 10-day training program with the U.S. military in Phnom Penh on Tuesday, questions are being raised again over Washington’s ongoing support to Cambodian security forces involved in serious human rights abuses. On January 3, military police officers opened fire with AK-47 ...

The government announced on Friday it would set up two commissions headed by Interior Minister Sar Kheng to investigate clashes between police and protesters early this month that left at least four dead, more than 20 injured and 23 arrested, a move criticised by rights ...

About 100 people, including 20 monks, held a ceremony in Phnom Penh on Friday in memory of the five people killed a week beforehand when military police opened fire on protesting garment workers, and demanded that the government introduce a mandatory, sector-wide standard minimum wage. In ...