News

More than 200 villagers in Preah Vihear town thumb-printed a joint complaint to rights group Adhoc over the weekend asking them to appeal to provincial authorities to intervene after their private electricity company raised its prices by more than 1,000 riel per kilowatt hour, NGO ...

Complaints of rights violations of migrant workers had increased more than 500 per cent in the first four months of 2012 compared with the same period last year, rights group Adhoc said yesterday. The number of individual victims of rights violations, mainly migrant workers in Malaysia ...

Thirteen Boeung Kak lake women who were sentenced to two and a half years in jail on Thursday following a lawyer-free trial that lasted just three hours will appeal their convictions, their distraught supporters said yesterday. As the reality of the trial, which rights groups have ...

Villagers from Chum Kiri commune in Banteay Meanchey province appealed to Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday to intervene in a land dispute concerning roughly 30 hectares of land they say was taken by district soldiers. Doeu Chay, a representative of 25 local families, said that land ...

Twenty convicts in Preah Sihanouk Provincial Prison were employed by military and local authorities to tear apart a nearby village on land slated for a second prison compound, villagers and rights groups alleged yesterday. However, prison authorities denied that any incarcerated people were involved in the ...

Rights group Adhoc yesterday said it had seen a spike in complaints from families of migrant workers since last year’s government-ordered freeze on recruitment agencies sending maids to Malaysia. At a press conference in Phnom Penh, Adhoc said it had received 141 complaints from the relatives ...

Human rights group Adhoc released a report on the state of Cambodian migrant workers yesterday, saying that tales of abuse from migrant workers and their families have increased five-fold compared to the same period last year. Seventy per cent of this year’s 141 complaints concerned domestic ...

The families of six maids from Kampong Chhnang province who left to work in Malaysia have filed complaints with human rights group Adhoc after losing contact with the women for more than two years, rights workers said yesterday. Soum Chankea, Adhoc’s provincial co-ordinator, said the complaints ...

Seventeen villagers from Banteay Meanchey province’s O’Chrou district filed a complaint yesterday with the rights group Adhoc after their homes were allegedly unlawfully bulldozed in June last year. ...

Two Cambodian women escaped Thailand on Friday a week after being trafficked across the border and sold into sex slavery in a Thai karaoke parlour, according to the rights group Adhoc and Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection officials. Tan Kimrany, an officer for Adhoc’s Women’s Rights ...

Sixteen ethnic minority families in Ratanakkiri province have claimed that they are being forced from their land after a commune chief signed it away, and that commune borders have been redrawn to dispossess them. On Friday, the families, who have been living on 30 hectares of ...

The number of complaints filed in Kampong Chhnang province by the families of maids working in Malaysia has jumped exponentially compared to the same period last year, a rights worker told the Post yesterday. Provincial Adhoc coordinator Soum Chankea said 39 requests for the NGO’s intervention ...

Ninety-one NGOs put their names to a statement yesterday condemning the government’s escalating use of armed force against peaceful protesters and urged the authorities to engage with them to “break the current cycle of violence and impunity.” Joined by local human rights groups such as Adhoc ...

Eight villagers arrested in connection with an alleged uprising in Kratie province in which government security forces shot one girl dead have been charged with inciting insurrection, rights workers said yesterday. “All eight have been charged by the prosecutor already of committing insurrection against public authority. According ...

After a three-day blockade, soldiers pulled out over the weekend from the Kratie province village where a teenage girl was shot dead last week by government security forces, officials said yesterday. However, human rights workers denied a report by a provincial official that freedom of ...

Hundreds of people fled in fear yesterday from the village in Kratie province where a bloody security forces crackdown the previous morning left a 14-year-old girl dead. Joint police and military police forces locked down the area where a land dispute has raged this year, and ...

Security forces have sealed off a village in eastern Cambodia and denied entry to human rights workers after the fatal shooting of a teenager in the latest violent eviction aimed at clearing land for development. Soldiers said they needed to secure the area around Proma village, ...

The families of two maids working in Malaysia asked Preah Vihear’s anti-human trafficking office and the human rights group Adhoc yesterday to intervene on behalf of their daughters, whom they haven’t seen or heard from since last year, officials said. ...

Two journalists who were present when environmental activist Chut Wutty and military police officer In Rattana were killed last month have reportedly been summonsed to Koh Kong provincial court. Neang Boratino, Koh Kong provincial co-ordinator for the rights group Adhoc, said court sources had told him ...

Cambodia’s government, facing growing protests by villagers and warnings about disappearing wilderness, suspended the granting of land to domestic and foreign companies on Monday in a move to curb forced evictions and illegal logging. Rights groups in the impoverished but resource-rich Southeast Asian country said the ...

The U.N.’s human rights envoy to Cambodia, Surya Subedi, was in Ratanakkiri province yesterday as part of his weeklong visit to the country to investigate the impact land concessions have on local communities. Some rights groups have singled out land concessions as the premier human rights ...

The military police officer who killed well-known anti-logging campaigner Chut Wutty, 46, on Thursday in Koh Kong province then died by his own hand after turning his AK-47 assault rifle on himself in an apparent act of instant suicide following the slaying of the forestry ...

Villagers and police clashed Sunday after excavators moved in to prepare work on a disputed plot where authorities will build a CPP commune office in Stung Treng City’s Preah Bat commune, officials said yesterday. Hou Sam Ol, provincial monitor for local rights group Adhoc, said Stung ...

Parents of four girls sent to work as maids in Malaysia filed a complaint with Adhoc yesterday in Preah Vihear province saying they had not heard from their daughters for anywhere from two to nearly five years. Prak Leat, 41, said her daughter had left for ...