News

The World Bank says it will investigate reports from indigenous groups in Cambodia that a company funded by the bank’s International Finance Corporation is involved in deforestation and land grabs. The bank’s Office of the Compliance Adviser Ombudsman, or CAO, will first examine the credibility of ...

“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. ...

Thach Ry, a 64-year-old Khmer Krom man, fled Vietnam in 2008 after authorities there tried to arrest him for protesting the government’s treatment of his community. Arriving in Cambodia with his wife and daughter, authorities here tried to arrest him, too, he said, so like many ...

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 ...

U.S. Ambassador William Todd on Tuesday used his weekly newspaper column to urge Cambodia’s government to immediately conduct reforms that would even the country’s economic playing field, curb corruption, restore democratic freedoms and generally address the concerns of citizens who want change. “Corruption and nepotism contribute ...

In a new report highlighting abuse in Cambodia’s garment industry, Human Rights Watch has called on the Cambodian government to cease “intimidation and threats” against workers. The group interviewed nearly 200 factory workers from 55 different factories, and found that anti-union discrimination and poor workers conditions ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen was sued by a young man for allegedly cutting two islands of Cambodia to Vietnam. Neang Sokhun, 25, filed a complaint on Monday with Phnom Penh Municipal Court against Hun Sen for allegedly cutting Koh Tral and Koh Krochorch Sess to Vietnam. ...

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 ...

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 ...

Video footage of Daun Penh district deputy governor Sok Penh Vuth bashing a defenceless man with a bullhorn on Monday has sparked outrage and demands for his ouster, but his boss told the Post yesterday that people shouldn’t be too hasty to judge, suggesting the footage may ...

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 ...

International trade leaders say Cambodia’s workers and managers should continue to negotiate for an increase in wages, despite a deadly crackdown on worker protests earlier this month. Workers want a raise in the minimum wage to $160 per month to keep up with the rising cost ...

Security guards that have forcibly detained protesters in the capital in recent weeks include large numbers of men who have received no government security training, Phnom Penh municipal spokesman Long Dimanche said yesterday. In an effort to recruit civilian “public order” officers, Dimanche told the Post, the ...

A group representing public-sector workers has called on the country’s civil servants to follow in the footsteps of teachers and begin a peaceful strike to demand higher salaries. A statement disseminated Thursday by the Cambodian Independent Civil Servants Association (CICA), which claims to have 1,530 members, ...

The South Korean Embassy on Wednesday denied a news report that it had lobbied Cambodian military authorities to “crack down on protesters” in a bid to shield Korean investments in the garment industry, prior to Friday’s killing of five protesters and the wounding of more ...

Dozens of ruling party lawmakers have signed a letter calling opposition demands for a re-election or the resignation of Prime Minister Hun Sen an attempted coup. The letter, signed by 54 Cambodian People’s Party lawmakers including senior MP Cheam Yeap on Friday and released to the ...

The Vietnamese embassy fired back yesterday at opposition party leader Sam Rainsy’s claim that Vietnamese companies granted economic land concessions in Prey Lang forest are turning the area into a Vietnamese “colony”. On Wednesday, Rainsy visited the forest and claimed that CRCK, a Vietnamese firm granted ...

The percentage of Cambodia covered in forest has fallen from about 72 per cent in 1973 to only about 46 per cent in 2013, satellite image data released yesterday shows. A series of animated maps that Open Development Cambodia (ODC) produced from NASA satellite images detail ...

Although International Human Rights Day ended in the forceful eviction of protesters from outside the US embassy last night, monks and their supporters who spent days marching to the capital met with no opposition in the morning as they defied a ban on marching to ...

Cambodia needs to build new leaders to take over the country in the next generation, a leading rights activist says. “This means the party is ready to let their children take over, family style,” he [Cambodian Center for Human Rights head Ou Virak]. “But this younger ...