A group of international NGOs urged the Asian Development Bank (ADB) yesterday to press the government on abandoning its plans for a law regulating the country’s non-governmental groups despite a recent pledge to drop its most controversial provision.
“The ADB should convince the Cambodian authorities to immediately withdraw the draft law,” the NGOs, which included Human Rights Watch and Freedom House, said in a joint statement addressed to ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda.
Since the government announced its plans to draft the law last year, NGOs have raised fears that authorities would use it to silence their critics.
Chief among their complaints was the draft’s insistence that all associations and NGOs be registered with the government, a move they said would violate their very constitutional right to freedom of assembly.
When the government said it would drop mandatory registration from the law in October, the NGOs cautiously welcomed the news.
But in their statement yesterday, the international NGOs said even a law without mandatory registration was something to worry about.
“Even if registration is changed to not be mandatory, there should not be other punitive provisions for unregistered NGOs, community organizations and civil society networks, such as an inability to open bank accounts, receive funds from domestic or foreign sources, or enter into contractual arrangements,” they said.
In targeting the ADB for help, the group noted that the bank works with NGOs on more than three-quarters of the projects it funds.
One of those NGOs, Sahmakum Teang Tnaut, was suspended by the government in August for five months for allegedly inciting poor families to oppose an ADB-funded project that was displacing them. A government letter implicates an unnamed ADB consultant in the suspension, though the ADB says an internal investigation came up with no evidence to corroborate the accounts.
Nuth Sa An, a secretary of state at the Interior Ministry leading the drafting of the law, said the government still planned on holding another workshop with NGOs and would issue a fourth draft in advance.
Deputy Director of the Interior Ministry’s political affairs department Mey Narath, who announced the government’s plans to drop mandatory registration, said he did not know when they would meet again with the NGOs.
The ADB did not reply to a request for comment.
