News

More than 200 villagers involved in three different land disputes gathered in front of Cambodia’s top court in the capital Tuesday to demand the release of jailed rights campaigner Yorm Bopha ahead of her final appeal against a criminal conviction later this week. Yorm Bopha’s impending ...

The government has ordered the SL Garment factory to rehire 19 worker representatives, following a brutal crackdown on demonstrators outside the home of Prime Minister Hun Sen last week. In a letter to the company, Khun Chinken, undersecretary of state for the Ministry of Labor, said ...

Nine South Koreans and four Cambodian nationals allegedly participating in an illegal gambling operation in Siem Reap City were sent to the provincial court for questioning Monday, police officials said. The suspects were arrested Saturday night along with 21 Cambodian women when police raided an illegal ...

Phnom Penh City Hall’s plans to undertake the largest redrawing of the city’s administrative boundaries in decades, by creating five new districts before May’s district and city-level council elections, is likely an effort to gerrymander voting constituencies, a senior opposition party member said Monday. Municipal government ...

Cambodia lost more than 7 percent of its forest cover over the past 12 years—the fifth fastest rate in the world—according to a new study of global forest cover change that sharply contradicts the government’s own rosier figures. Published Friday in the journal Science and led ...

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to help Cambodia with electoral reforms, following a request by Prime Minister Hun Sen to send experts to the country ahead of future polls and amid an ongoing dispute over national elections held more than three months ago. The ...

Vietnam has joined Cambodia in questioning the sustainability of the planned Don Sahong dam project on the Mekong River in southern Laos, saying more environmental impact studies are needed before the scheme moves forward. Le Duc Trung, director general of the Vietnam National Mekong Committee under ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Friday said it expects Cambodia’s economy to grow by 7 percent this year, fueled mostly by the garment, tourism and construction sectors, though risks such as extreme weather and labor market instabilities could cause growth to fluctuate. The IMF also ...

The bilateral trade volume between Cambodia and China rose by 31 percent in the first nine months of the year thanks to closer ties between the two governments, Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Bu Jianguo said Thursday. From January to September this year, the two-way trade volume ...

Fewer and fewer primary schoolteachers are willing to cope with poor pay and the worst student-to-teacher ratio outside of Africa, government data shows. Annual reports released by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport reveal that despite fervent recruitment efforts, every year since 2005 – when ...

A new study and accompanying short film released yesterday call for all lower Mekong dam developers to halt plans until further impact studies can be made. Hydropower dams will have a greater impact on river flows than even climate change, according to research by the University ...

More than 600 families living along the Siem Reap riverside are to be relocated at the beginning of next year by the government, a top provincial official said yesterday. The families will be evicted as part of a provincial government plan to widen the river to ...

A 7-month-old baby, a woman and two men en route to Malaysia were rescued from two alleged traffickers near the Cambodia-Thai border in Banteay Meanchey’s Poipet town, police said yesterday. Heng Chhun, 48, and Som Na, 38, will face charges related to human trafficking, Prum Sonthor, ...

A protester involved in Tuesday’s clash between SL Garment Factory workers and security forces filed a complaint yesterday against Phnom Penh’s municipal and military police chiefs, accusing them of responsibility for the death of a 49-year-old street-food vendor who was killed by police gunfire, according ...

Vietnamese rubber firm Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) has failed to keep its commitments to address human rights and environmental abuses at its plantations in Cambodia, Global Witness said in a statement yesterday. In May, the London-based NGO published an investigation into two Vietnamese rubber companies ...

Twelve representatives of 50 families in Preah Vihear’s Kulen district are seeking aid from a rights group after being summonsed to court last week over a land dispute with a Malaysian company. The villagers gathered in Adhoc’s provincial office in Srayong commune yesterday to draft and ...

Six months after two of her co-workers were crushed to death when a storage level collapsed at the Wing Star Shoes factory in Kampong Speu, employee Yu Manith is noticing the cracks in a factory wall beginning to expand. Shortly after police rummaged through the ...

Seeing is believing—particularly in a country where the government controls the broadcast media and current affairs news, aired on pro-ruling par­ty TV and radio, is of­ten at odds with the country’s few independent media outlets. But in the aftermath of a violent clash between striking garment ...

Environmental campaign group Global Witness on Thursday called on the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Deutsche Bank to divest immediately from a Vietnamese firm whose rubber plantations in Cambodia are accused of rampant illegal logging and forced evictions of indigenous communities. The call came exactly six ...

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced Thursday it had suspended contracts with two international suppliers of mosquito nets after uncovering serious financial wrongdoing in Cambodia. The move followed a probe by Global Fund inspectors into claims of corruption at the suppliers, ...

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who makes a visit to Phnom Penh this weekend, should leverage his country’s aid to pressure the Cambodian government to launch an independent probe into fraud and other irregularities in disputed elections, a rights group said Thursday. As head of the ...

The Cambodian Ministry of Heath (MOH) reported today the confirmation of two additional of human H5N1 avian influenza cases, the 25th and 26th cases of 2013, according to a Joint Press Release from the MOH and the World Health Organization (WHO) dated Nov. 14. According to ...

Bilateral trade volume between Cambodia and its neighboring Vietnam has hit 2.7 billion U.S. dollars in the first nine months of the year, up 10 percent compared with the 2.45 billion U.S. dollars over the same period last year, a Cambodian trade official said Thursday. Kem ...

Orix, a Japanese financial conglomerate, will acquire about $11 million shares in Acleda Bank PLC, Cambodia’s largest bank, by the year’s end, officials announced Wednesday, although industry executives said the investment appears only exploratory and likely won’t make more than a ripple in the banking ...