January 2004
A decade after the United Nations concluded its peacekeeping operation in Cambodia, the country continues to take halting steps toward building democratic institutions and promoting respect for fundamental human rights. However, Cambodia is plagued by a weak and politicized judiciary, political violence, intimidation of opposition party members and journalists, and widespread impunity for human rights offenders.
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- Political Violence and Intimidation
- Weak Judiciary and Impunity
- Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the ICC
- Restrictions on Freedom of Assembly
- Freedom of Expression
- Conflicts over Land and Resource Rights
- Refugee Rights
- Torture
- Human Trafficking
- Key International Actors
Political Violence and Intimidation
All three national elections conducted in Cambodia since the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements in 1991 have been conducted in an atmosphere of violence and intimidation. The lead-up to the most recent National Assembly election in 2003 began on a grim note with the murders in February of Om Radsady, senior advisor to Prince Norodom Ranariddh, and Buddhist monk Sam Bun Thoeun, reportedly an opponent of the ban on monks' voting by the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) of Prime Minister Hun Sen. A judge and a court clerk were killed in April, and another judge was attacked and beaten. During the campaign, overt political violence was often supplanted by more sophisticated forms of intimidation and coerced party membership. Village and commune chiefs, most of whom are members of the ruling CPP, threatened opposition party supporters with violence, expulsion from their villages, and denial of access to community resources such as village rice distributions. Thirteen political party activists were killed between the February 2002 commune council elections and the July 2003 national elections.
Weak Judiciary and Impunity
Cambodia has made little progress in reforming its judicial system, which has been widely condemned by the United Nations and many of its member states for its lack of independence, low levels of competence, and corruption. The government has yet to take concrete steps to ensure the independence and effective functioning of the judiciary by restructuring the Supreme Council of Magistracy or submitting a law on the statute of magistrates to the National Assembly. Other issues plaguing the judicial system include excessive pretrial detention, trials in absentia, ineffective enforcement of verdicts, and low paid and poorly trained personnel. Cases of politically related violence and crimes committed by government authorities or those with ties to high-ranking officials are often not prosecuted or even investigated. The resulting problem of impunity ranges from politically motivated crimes such as the execution of Ministry of Interior official Ho Sok in 1997 in the Ministry of Interior compound, to cases that have nothing to do with politics, such as the torture and killing of a teenage boy by the bodyguards of a provincial governor in 1998 after the boy entered the governor's compound to steal chickens. In hundreds of cases such as these no effective action has ever been taken to investigate or prosecute the crime.
Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the ICC
After five years of negotiations, in 2003 Cambodia and the U.N. reached an agreement to establish an internationally-assisted tribunal under Cambodian law to bring Khmer Rouge leaders to justice. However the Cambodian government's record of control, interference, and intimidation in the work of the courts, as well as the lack of training of Cambodia's judicial officials, gives real reason for concern that prosecutions could be politically influenced. An extraordinary chambers is to be established within Cambodia's judiciary to try senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and those who were most responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed while the Khmer Rouge were in power (1975-79). Based in Cambodia, this "mixed tribunal" will be comprised of a majority of Cambodian judges and a minority of international judges, working alongside Cambodian and international co-prosecutors.
In 2002, Cambodia became the first Southeast Asian country to ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). After U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Cambodia in June 2003, however, Prime Minister Hun Sen agreed to a bilateral immunity agreement with the U.S. that exempts U.S. and Cambodian citizens from the authority of the court. In October 2003 the Council of Ministers adopted the draft agreement, which is expected to be approved by the National Assembly in 2004.
Restrictions on Freedom of Assembly
The government has clamped down on freedom of assembly since January 2003, when government security forces refrained from intervening when rioters attacked the Thai embassy and Thai businesses in Phnom Penh. Since that time, the government has denied virtually all requests for demonstrations on the grounds that such gatherings will jeopardize national security and public order. Authorities have rejected requests for rallies by students, victims of domestic violence, environmentalists, opposition parties, and garment workers. Police have used excessive and disproportionate force in dispelling rallies that have taken place without official permission. In May 2003, for example, more than 100 heavily armed police officers swung their batons and beat on their plastic shields as they marched towards several hundred peaceful protesters at an opposition rally in front of the National Assembly. At least a dozen people were wounded, some by electric shock batons. In January 2004 dozens of police and gendarmerie were dispatched to stop a demonstration by the Khmer Front Party against CPP-organized celebrations of the anniversary of Vietnam's ousting of the Khmer Rouge. Police arrested the four demonstrators and ordered journalists to leave the scene or face "action." In May 2003, the National Election Committee and the Ministry of Interior issued guidelines restricting political parties' private and public meetings outside the campaign period on the grounds of maintaining public order. At this writing, no CPP gathering had been denied permission by the authorities.
Freedom of Expression
More than two dozen privately owned newspapers are published in Cambodia, including some affiliated with opposition groups. However Cambodia's reputation for having one of the freest presses in Southeast Asia has been tarnished by official attempts to silence free speech and opinion and block access by opposition parties to the broadcast media, the main source of information for Cambodia's largely rural society. Cambodian television stations are still owned fully or partly by the government. The government continues to deny a radio broadcast license to the opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP). In February 2003 the government ordered the temporary closure of the independent radio station Sambok Kmum (Beehive), which was scapegoated for instigating anti-Thai riots. SRP activist Nou Sath was imprisoned for six months in May 2003 on charges of defamation and dissemination of false information after distributing leaflets criticizing Hun Sen. In October 2003 Chou Chetharith, the deputy editor of the royalist radio station Ta Prohm, was shot and killed outside the station's Phnom Penh offices after Hun Sen publicly warned the station to stop broadcasting insults of the CPP. The murders of at least six journalists since 1994 have gone unpunished.
Conflicts over Land and Resource Rights
Land conflicts are a major issue throughout the country. Legal Aid of Cambodia, a Cambodian nongovernmental organization (NGO), reports that its annual land-related caseload involves 7,000 families, or 35,000 people, with the vast majority of the conflicts involving military commanders or provincial and local officials. Volunteers and staff from human rights groups and environment organizations have been threatened, attacked, arrested and even killed. These include grassroots activists in the provinces who are organizing to protect their land or natural resources on which they depend for their livelihood. In 1998, Pourng Tong, an activist member of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC), was killed in Kandal province, after helping families resist eviction. In 2002, the offices of a grassroots environmental organization in Kratie were broken into while project staff were in Phnom Penh for national advocacy meetings. The director of the NGO was later threatened with arrest and interrogated about her activities in Phnom Penh. In April 2002 the country representative of Global Witness, an NGO that monitors illegal logging, was attacked and beaten outside their Phnom Penh offices after the group issued a critical report on illegal logging prior to an international donor meeting. The Prime Minister threatened to pursue criminal charges against the country representative for disinformation and defamation.
Refugee Rights
Since March 2002 Cambodia has closed both of its provincial refugee camps and refused to take new Montagnard asylum seekers from Vietnam. In violation of its obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Convention Against Torture, the government has forcibly returned hundreds of Montagnards to Vietnam, where they face ongoing persecution and in some cases arrest, unfair trials, and torture. In 2002, three asylum seekers under the protection of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Phnom Penh—a dissident Buddhist monk from Vietnam and two Chinese Falun Gong members—were abducted and deported back to their home countries, where all three faced serious threat of torture.
Torture
Torture continues to be used with impunity in Cambodia, particularly by police officers attempting to extract confessions from suspects detained incommunicado in police stations, without access to lawyers or human rights workers. Under Cambodia's amended Criminal Procedure Code, suspects can be held in police detention—the period when police commonly use torture to extract confessions—for up to seventy-two hours.
Human Trafficking
Despite periodic police raids and temporary closure of brothels, powerful figures running human trafficking networks, and their accomplices—many of them government officials, soldiers, or police—largely continue to be immune from prosecution. In March 2003 Cambodian police conducted a joint operation with US law enforcement officials in Phnom Penh, arresting several pimps and brothel owners and rescuing thirty-seven young sex workers, many of them underage. Three of the brothel owners were later sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment. Despite high-profile raids and the "rescue" of child prostitutes, the government provides little follow-up in terms of social services, counseling, and job training with the victims afterwards, resulting in many falling back into the hands of brothel owners or traffickers.
Key International Actors
Cambodia receives more than half of its annual budget from foreign aid and loans. In June 2002 international donors pledged U.S.$635 million to the Cambodian government. In 2003 donors postponed their annual Consultative Group meeting in which yearly pledges are made because of Cambodia's failure to form a new government after the July 2003 elections. Donors have expressed strong concerns at the slow pace of legal and judicial reform, unchecked exploitation of natural resources, and corruption.
Japan remains the largest bilateral donor to Cambodia and provided the bulk of the funding for the 2003 national elections, along with the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. China is playing an increasingly influential role in Cambodia, both as a donor and an investor.
Cambodia continues to try to emerge as a player within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Cambodia hosted the ASEAN Regional Forum in 2003 and has indicated its intention to be part of a regional terrorism accord. Thailand and Cambodia suspended diplomatic relations after the anti-Thai riots in Phnom Penh in January 2003. Relations were resumed several months later after the Cambodian government sent an apology and pledged to pay compensation.
In 2003 the World Bank reduced part of a $18 million loan for Cambodia's Demobilization program and called for $2.8 million to be paid back because of corruption within the project. At the end of 2003, the Bank announced that it plans to release the second half of a long-delayed $30 million development loan to Cambodia, stating that the government has instituted sufficient reforms by passing an investment law and drafting a forestry law.
The Cambodia Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which has maintained a field operation in Phnom Penh and several provinces since 1994 continues to downsize its staff and in 2003 closed all but one of its provincial offices. The U.N. Secretary General's Special Representative for Cambodia continues to make several trips a year to Cambodia, where he has focused on the issues of judicial reform, land conflicts, resource rights, and refugee policy.
