More than 50 NGO officials gathered at the Star Kampuchea organization last week and asked the government to abandon its draft directive on NGOs, an official from the organization said on Wednesday.
The directive too narrowly limits what NGOs can do and has been created by the Ministry of Interior without consultations or transparency, Star Kampuchea spokesman Yoib Meta said.
“The ministry should stop making this draft and instead pass a law on NGOs in the next government term,” Yoib Meta said. Such a law should be drafted with input from civil society, he added.
According to a draft of the directive obtained by Star Kampuchea, NGOs currently working in Cambodia would not have to re-register with the government once the directive went into effect, but new NGOs would come under a stricter set of guidelines.
To register, NGOs and associations, international and national alike, would have to submit information including their history, location and statutes. This information would be scrutinized by the ministry, which would reply within 30 days as to whether the organization was approved or whether it needed to “correct” the information and send it back.
To NGOs, this requirement smacks of government control, Yoib Meta said.
Under Article 6, associations must be politically neutral and cannot serve political parties. Yoib Meta said this provision violates the Constitution, which gives people the right to participate in politics simultaneously with the right to form associations.
Politicians should not be barred from forming NGOs, he said.
The draft would also require groups to disclose their finances and their projected yearly budgets to the ministry each year.
Sak Setha, director of the ministry’s Department of General Administration, said the directive was purely an efficiency measure, not an attempt to control NGOs.
“Right now there are 1,100 NGOs in Cambodia. It is difficult to work with them because there is no law defining their status,” he said. “If this directive goes into effect, it will be easier.”
Currently there are no formal requirements for NGOs and the system of cataloguing them is chaotic, with some listed at the ministry and others at the Council of Ministers, Sak Setha said.
NGOs that are already registered must tell the Ministry of their location within six months of the directive’s passage. If they don’t, their names will be erased from government rolls.
