Not far from the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, a group of saffron-robed monks have been learning some modern lessons.
Gathered around a table inside a pagoda, they’re reading about the shocking statistics that Cambodian kids face.
One in two have been severely beaten, one in four emotionally abused and one in 20 sexually assaulted.
Police are investigating allegations that the son of Cambodia’s top Islamic cleric had raped and sexually assaulted 18 girls in a school dormitory after complaints were lodged online by students which prompted NGOs to reach out.
At least one girl is reportedly pregnant, while others have refused to attend the An-Nikmah Al-Islamiyah Institute in Phnom Penh, where the dormitory manager and son of Sos Kamri allegedly physically abused six female students and sexually harassed 12 others.
Sok Kamri, director of the Supreme Islamic Centre, defended his son, Sos Haimi, saying he had denied any wrongdoing and claimed rumors of such behavior were false.
In full: https://www.ucanews.com/news/sexual-abuse-allegations-leveled-at-cambodian-islamic-school/106710
It’s happened to us all: a message arrives on our phone that looks genuine but turns out to be a scam. The internet has enabled scammers worldwide to find and contact potential victims. In Southeast Asia, the problem has reached alarming proportions and generates billions of dollars. FRANCE 24’s William de Tamaris, Aruna Popuri and Justin McCurry report from Cambodia and the Myanmar border. Warning: this report contains graphic content.
In Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands of people are employed by online scam centres to extract as much money as possible from victims. Mainly based in Cambodia and Myanmar, these cyber-scam hubs generate billions of dollars.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet kept a low profile at the ASEAN summit in Vientiane, holding meetings on the sidelines with fellow leaders but making no public statements to the media.
An ex-military man, he marched straight past waiting reporters as he arrived for summit sessions, his most animated moment a jovial conversation with Singapore’s foreign minister.
More than a year after inheriting power from his father Hun Sen, he has yet to hold an open news conference to explain how he will navigate challenges including balancing China and the West.
Several Cambodian journalists contributed to this report, but have requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the story.
Rare timber species likely logged from Cambodia’s embattled protected forests have been exported to Vietnam and China for years by Angkor Plywood, one of the country’s most notorious logging companies, Mongabay can reveal.
Over a year-long investigation, Mongabay has acquired documents and testimonies, as well as photo and video evidence, that show Angkor Plywood has been illegally logging timber from Cambodian protected areas and violating various laws by exporting sawn logs internationally. The company has done this for years with impunity, in part due to the connections of the company’s management.
Angkor Plywood was established by its chairman, Chea Pov, a man who has worked his way up Cambodia’s timber business, in 2011 with Taiwanese national Lu Chu Chang. The latter previously headed the Cambodian Timber Industry Association and developed a reputation in the early 2000s for illegally felling protected resin trees belonging to Indigenous communities.
Local authorities last week transferred twelve Japanese men believed to be members of a crime ring back to Japan, where they were accused of fraud.
The twelve men, aged between 18 and 45, are believed to be “callers,” who pose as police offers during calls to victims in Japan over the telephone in attempting to defraud them.
On August 2 and 7, local police took them into custody from a room in a building in the city of Bavet, located in southeastern Cambodia. Inside the building, notes and a dozen smartphones believed to have been used in the crimes were found.
Hundreds of victims of the alleged pyramid-scheme operator iCon Group have emerged in Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Japan, while the number of complainants in Thailand passed the 500 mark.
On Sunday, police said the number of people who had filed complaints with the Central Investigation Bureau against the iCon Group were more than 500 so far, with claimed damages of more than 200 million baht.
Thai victims have told police that they were lured to become dealers or distributors of the firm’s supplementary food products with the promise that the products would sell like hotcakes. But they ended up failing to sell the products and were told instead to recruit more “dealers” to work under them so they could earn part of new recruits’ investment money.
In full: https://www.nationthailand.com/news/general/40042322
China paid for it. China built it. Now, satellite photos reveal Chinese warships are a permanent feature at a new naval base “gifted” to Cambodia.
A 300-metre-long, military-grade pier – big enough to accommodate Beijing’s aircraft carriers – is chief among the facilities being constructed by China at the Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand.
These include a dry dock, a wharf, new offices and barracks and several other large buildings.
The image was meant to send a stark message: criticise Hun Sen and you will be punished, even if you’re not in Cambodia.
Nuon Toeun appears front and centre in the photograph released by Cambodia authorities, handcuffed and flanked by armed guards outside a Phnom Penh prison.
Her crime? Making a social media post critical of the strongman leader who ruled Cambodia with an iron fist for decades before stepping down last year in favour of his son, Hun Manet.
Seven Malaysians rescued from job scams have remained stranded in Cambodia, according to the Sarawak United Peoples’ Party.
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Five of the victims are from Sarawak and two from Johor, SUPP public complaints bureau chief Milton Foo said, The Borneo Post reported.
Foo said all seven are in their early 20s.
Thirteen pregnant Philippine women accused of illegally acting as surrogate mothers in Cambodia after being recruited online could face prison terms after giving birth, a senior Interior Ministry official said Saturday.
Interior Ministry Secretary of State Chou Bun Eng, who leads the country’s fight against human trafficking and sexual exploitation, said police found 24 foreign women, 20 Philippine and four Vietnamese, when they raided a villa in Kandal province, near the capital of Phnom Penh, on September 23.
Thirteen of the Philippine women were found to be pregnant and were charged in court on October 1 under a provision in the law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation, she said.
The Thai and Cambodian journalists’ associations have issued a joint statement expressing their deep concern over Miss Grand International’s cancellation of Miss Grand Cambodia as co-host of the beauty contest.
MGI has moved the entire schedule to Bangkok despite an agreement for Cambodia to host half of the program.
The Thai Journalists Association (TJA) and the Club of Cambodian Journalists (CCJ) noted that media outlets in both countries, particularly on social media, reported on the incident on October 8, causing the news to go viral.
Chhim Sithar, 36, has recently been released after two years in prison. The trade unionist was convicted by the Cambodian regime for ‘inciting’ to commit felony. Her crime? Advocating for the rights of workers at NagaWorld, the largest casino in Cambodia, located in the heart of the capital, Phnom Penh.
In 2021, around 1,300 employees of the casino, the majority of whom are members of the Labor Rights Supported Union of NagaWorld Employees (LRSU), which Sithar leads, were made redundant under the pretext of poor economic performance due to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the company, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, reported pre-tax profits of over 22 million dollars that same year.
Chhim Sithar believes that the primary aim of the redundancies was to weaken the LRSU’s influence within the company. The union was on the verge of representing half of the casino’s employees, which, under Cambodian law, would have allowed it to participate in annual collective bargaining. In response to the dismissals, Sithar led a series of demonstrations calling for the reinstatement of the terminated employees. These protests were among the largest Cambodia had witnessed in a decade, and continued until Sithar was arrested in January 2022.
In full: https://www.equaltimes.org/cambodian-trade-union-leader-chhim?lang=en
Abrupt decision to remove Cambodia as co-host of Miss Grand International (MGI) 2024 and transfer all pageants to Bangkok on October 8 has sparked outrage and harsh criticism online from Cambodian netizens, saying it was unfair to Cambodia.
Cambodia had bought a license to be a co-host, with half of the activities scheduled from October 3-14 and the other half in Thailand from October 15 to 26.
Im Sokunthea, the National Country Director of Miss Grand Cambodia, held a press conference at Sokha Hotel on October 9th to express her concerns about Cambodia being sidelined during the event.
Labor advocates have poked holes at Asics’s claims that a prosecuted and jailed union leader at one of its Cambodian suppliers was reinstated to his former position following the overturning of his conviction—which would have seen him imprisoned for a year—and that factory management had nothing to do with the criminal charges that led to his arrest in the first place.
For the six months leading up to April 19, the same day his appeal was heard in court, Chea Chan sat behind bars facing what the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) describes as “obviously false and retaliatory criminal charges“ that stemmed from his elected role as head of a newly formed independent union at Wing Star Shoes, which also supplies footwear to Muji. Neither Wing Star Shoes nor Muji responded to requests for comment.
Em Phat, 53, studies his eel tanks with the intensity of a man gambling with his livelihood.
For millennia, fishermen like him have relied on the bounty of the Tonle Sap in Cambodia, Southeast Asia’s largest lake and the epicenter of the world’s most productive inland fishery. But climate change, dams upstream on the Mekong River that sustains the lake, and deforestation in the region have changed everything.
There aren’t enough fish and living by the lake has become dangerous as storms intensify due to global warming. “Being a fisherman is hard,” he said.
In full: https://apnews.com/article/cambodia-eels-fish-mekong-tonle-sap-2672faf10b8fb9b11508111877dcec27
Cambodia has said it is willing to renew negotiations with Thailand for the joint exploration and development of an offshore oil and gas field in the Gulf of Thailand.
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The area targeted is believed to hold at least US$300 billion worth of reserves.
Pen Bona, the Cambodian government spokesperson, told Bloomberg News that his country remains committed to discussing the issue with the Pheu Thai-led government.
When Davuth fell behind on his microfinance loan earlier this year, a credit officer visited his home in Ratanakiri province almost daily. The officer pressured him to borrow from neighbourhood lenders or sell his farmland – his main source of income and livelihood, he said.
“I replied that if I sold my land, which includes my cashew and cassava crops, I’d rather die,” Davuth, a Kachok Indigenous man, said in August. He requested a pseudonym, fearing reprisals.
He claimed the credit officer, representing microfinance institution LOLC Cambodia, threatened and intimidated him until his first suicide attempt in March. His wife intervened just in time to save his life.
Cambodian police have rescued 20 Filipino women who were allegedly trafficked into the country to be used as surrogate mothers in a baby trafficking ring.
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Of the 20, at least 13 are pregnant and are currently receiving care at a local hospital, while the remaining seven are set to be repatriated, according to the Philippine Embassy in Phnom Penh on Tuesday, October 8.
The embassy issued the statement in response to a report by the Cambodia-based Khmer Times on the same day that details the involvement of an unnamed Philippine agency in bringing Filipino women to Cambodia to serve as surrogate mothers, despite the country’s ban on surrogacy.
Mech Dara, an award-winning Cambodian journalist and one of the kingdom’s last remaining independent media voices, was arrested on Monday, September 30. He has been detained over a social media post for “incitement to disturb social security”, and faces up to two years in jail.
The news of Dara’s arrest has saddened and disturbed many within Cambodia and elsewhere. But it will have shocked few. Dara’s courageous journalism has made him a persistent thorn in the side of Cambodia’s ruling class.
No stranger to harassment and intimidation by Cambodia’s increasingly repressive state apparatus, Dara had told me when we last met that he was considering applying for political asylum abroad. Life had become impossible in Cambodia.
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