Prisons

The Koh Kong Provincial Court in Cambodia decided to suspend a year and a half sentence handed down to three activists from environmental NGO Mother Nature who have been in prison since last August – longer than the legal limit for pre-trial detention. The three ...

With more than 1,000 human-trafficking cases pending in the courts including a large number of Myanmar victims, Thailand has promised to speed up the legal process, the Department of Special Investigation deputy chief Pol Colonel Songsak Raksaksakul said on 14 June. Songsak met on 14 June with ...

As Cambodia moves towards opening its first privately run prison, international experts have warned the government may have misunderstood the concept and cautioned that privatisation likely isn’t the best way to tackle chronic overcrowding in prisons. Keep reading ...

Drug use in Cambodia’s prison system is not limited to inmates alone. Prison guards too have been found to be using illicit substances, senior prison officials have acknowledged, with the government set to launch an investigation into the prevalence of drug use among prison staff ...

After more than 40 men broke out of a Phnom Penh drug rehabilitation cen­ter on 5 February, officials said this week that they have called off efforts to arrest 18 es­capees who remain at large, in­stead asking for their families to re­turn them voluntarily. A total ...

Thousands of Myanmar migrant workers are spending months or even years in detention camps in Malaysia waiting for the government to confirm their citizenship status, migrant rights groups say. The delay has caused a backlog in the 11 detention camps throughout Malaysia, recently returned workers say. ...

The Myanmar government under outgoing President Thein Sein on 22 January freed 29 political prisoners across the country, 18 of them from the notorious Insein Prison in the capital Yangon. Keep reading ...

With so many supporters soon to be in high places, the Former Political Prisoner Society has high expectations of the incoming National League for Democracy government. About 100 of the MPs preparing to take their seats on 1 February, including NLD leader Daw Aung San Suu ...

Cambodia’s badly overcrowded prison population leapt by nearly 20 per cent in the first 10 months of this year, government data show, raising serious health concerns. The figures, released by the Interior Ministry’s general department of prisons on 15 December, show that there were 17,522 prisoners ...

A prominent local rights group has been forced to abandon its annual International Human Rights Day (IHRD) events in Cambodia’s prisons for the first time in 20 years because of “prohibitive” conditions imposed by the government, it said on 6 December. In a statement, Licadho said ...