Registration Project Delayed by Corrupt Officials

Corrupt commune officials de­mand­ing money for registration and paperwork have likely slow­ed a government project to register all Cam­bodian citizens and issue birth certificates, Phnom Penh Deputy Mu­nicipal Gov­er­nor Mam Bun Neang said Tues­day.

The project should have finished this year but has subse­quent­ly been extended to 2006, of­fi­cials said.

The municipality has installed complaint boxes in commune of­fices in Phnom Penh for citizens to re­port bribe demands during the reg­istration process. Mam Bun Neang said the boxes will be checked daily and that corrupt officials will be punished.

“We will warn [the corrupt officials],” he said. “If they continue we will fire them.”

Some commune officials de­man­d­­ed as much as $5 or $10 for reg­istration and birth certificates that officially are free, said Leng Vy, Interior Ministry local administrative department director.

The troubled new registration pro­­­cess replaces family books, which are being phased out, Leng Vy said.

Shabir Ahmed, adviser for NGO Plan International Cambodia, which is collaborating with the Interior Ministry on the Asian De­vel­opment Bank funded project, said although there may have been in­cidents of corruption, the fact that eight million Cam­bodians have been reg­istered dem­on­strates the project’s efficiency.

The new system will be more credible and reliable, because individuals rather than families will be registered in a standard way na­tion­wide, Ahmed said.

“The civil administration system has two uses,” Ahmed said. “One is to generate data, and the other is to generate civil administration documents, which include birth certificates, marriage certificates and death certificates.”

More reliable statistics aid the running of the state, and credible do­c­uments help citizens to ac­count for and protect children and access services, Ahmed said.

Each of the nation’s 1,621 commune councils has a registration team, totaling more than 13,000 paid and volunteer registration officials going village to village around the country, Ahmed said.

According to the law, newborns must be registered within 30 days and deaths within 15, he added.