The family of a jailed woman who died while in state custody in Ratanakiri is seeking answers about her cause of death and alleging foul play, while officials say she fell in a prison bathroom and died of a stroke or heart attack.
Justice Minister Keut Rith on Monday said anti-corruption measures were a key part of a plan to reduce the criminal case backlog at the courts, but also said corruption was not the cause of the current case pileup.
The E.U. has listed Cambodia as one of 12 “high-risk” countries with deficient anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing efforts, but the government on Friday said officials were working hard to get the nation off international watch lists.
New, higher fines for traffic violations and stricter enforcement by authorities will place undue strain on motorists who are already losing income due to the pandemic-related economic downturn, civil society members and other observers said this week.
A sweeping state of emergency bill, which critics say would hand the government excessive powers during an ill-defined national crisis, was signed into law on Wednesday, an official said.
After the National Bank suggested lenders cut struggling borrowers a break, some financial institutions say they are relieving customers affected by Covid-19 disruptions on a case-by-case basis. But civil society groups say the measures won’t offer debt relief quickly enough.
The National Assembly on Friday passed a sweeping state of emergency draft law, which rights advocates say is ripe for abuse, as the number of Covid-19 cases in the country has slowly, but steadily risen since last month.
Workers at a Kampong Speu shoe factory protested on Thursday, accusing the owner of suspending them from work without agreeing to pay partial salaries as companies would be required to according to Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Prime Minister Hun Sen on Tuesday said potential closures of garment factories in coming months would be due to novel coronavirus quarantine measures cutting manufacturers off from Chinese materials suppliers, not the result of the E.U. suspending trade benefits.
The reported expenses of on trial opposition leader Kem Sokha’s Human Rights Party fell below the plausible costs of the party’s activities, government lawyers claimed on Thursday, though they did not say what activities were supposedly unaccounted for.
Local industry groups have asked the E.U. to postpone the partial withdrawal of Cambodia’s tariff-free access to the European bloc for a year to allow the garment sector time to recover from the ongoing pandemic-spurred economic crisis.
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