News
Cambodia wildlife official faces 145 years in jail for smuggling long-tailed macaques to US
Federal prosecutors have charged eight people with smuggling endangered monkeys, including a Cambodian wildlife official who was arrested in the US while travelling to a conference on protecting endangered species. The official plus a colleague in that country’s wildlife agency and six people connected to a ...
Associated Press
China Announces New ASEAN Belt & Road Initiative Projects Centered Around Cambodia
The Phnom Penh-Bavet Highway which will ultimately link the Cambodian and Vietnamese capital cities The 2022 ASEAN summit took place at the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, this past weekend, with China as an official guest. At the event, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced Beijing’s approval of Chinese investment ...
Chris Devonshire-Ellis
Cambodia’s modern slavery nightmare: the human trafficking crisis overlooked by authorities
t 3.28am on 29 June 2021, Xu Mingjian crept out of a dorm room inside a gated compound in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and made his way to the second floor, where his friend, another victim of trafficking, was waiting. The two had hatched a desperate plan to ...
Lindsey Kennedy, Nathan Paul Southern and Huang Yan
Southeast Asia’s Data Localization Push is a Double-Edged Sword
With the publication of the ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025 (ADM 2025), member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have endeavored to promote the digitalization of the region. In this digital transformation process, data is essential because every interaction in the digital world produces and relies on ...
Xirui Li
Indigenous Cambodians stripped of ancestral land
In the remote and densely forested northeastern province of Mondulkiri in Cambodia, Song Pro, a member of the indigenous Bunong community, stares at a rubber plantation that was once a sacred forest. When the war in Indochina came to Cambodia in the 1970s, the forest saved ...
Nehru Pry
Girls, you are not alone in the fight for rights
In an attempt to continue promoting young women’s rights and gender equality, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs led the commemoration of International Day of the Girl Child in the Kingdom in partnership with Plan International Cambodia. The celebration presided over by Im Sithe, Secretary of State ...
Yim Sreylin
Cambodia Microfinance Should be Taxed to Address Climate Change Impact, Research Says
New research from Cambodia challenges the microfinance industry’s assertions that its loans help farmers to resist the impacts of climate change. In fact, the research argues, microfinance undermines the capacity of farmers to respond to unstable climate conditions. The profit from Cambodia generated by foreign-owned microfinance ...
David Whitehouse
Cambodian mega dam’s resurrection on the Mekong ‘the beginning of the end’
A long-dormant plan to build a mega dam on the mainstream of the Mekong River in Cambodia’s northeastern Stung Treng province appears to have been revived this year, leaving locals immediately downstream of the potential sites worried and experts confounded. First studied in 2007, the 1,400-megawatt ...
Gerald Flynn, Nehru Pry
Mekong nations look for bridge over ‘ASEAN development gap’
Giving equal momentum to development remains the major topic that the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) nations – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV) – will discuss at the 54th ASEAN Economic Ministers’ (AEM) Meeting, slated to kick off on September 14 in Siem Reap town. Pen ...
Eng Reachny
In the Mekong Basin, an ‘unnecessary’ dam poses an outsized threat
“I remember seeing a buffalo, its head tied to a floating barrel, drifting down the river,” says Pheng Sisuwath, gesturing to the Sekong River from his stilt house in Cambodia’s northeastern province of Stung Treng. That was four years ago, when one of the auxiliary dams ...
Gerald Flynn, Nehru Pry
