Clothilde Le Coz 
PHNOM PENH — Acid is increasingly becoming a personal weapon of choice, especially against women. In the last 15 years, it has been estimated that more than 3,200 acid-throwing attacks were recorded in countries as varied as Bangladesh, Britain, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda, totaling an estimated 3,500 victims in that time period. The numbers are estimated to be … Read more
PHNOM PENH — Accused of organizing an “insurrection” last year, nearly a dozen Parliament ministers from the political opposition were sentenced to prison terms from 7 to 20 years by a Phnom Penh court this summer. The charge stemmed from demonstrations held in July 2014, rallying the opposition to end the national ban on public … Read more
PHNOM PENH — A controversial $40 million deal signed between the Australian and Cambodian governments last September to resettle about 1,000 refugees from detention centers on the South Pacific island nation of Nauru to Cambodia was the first time two ratifying states of the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees agreed to transfer their resettlement … Read more
PHNOM PENH — Dueling depictions of Somaly Mam, the Cambodian activist who has campaigned against sex trafficking in her country and elsewhere, have splashed across large media outlets in the last six months. Mam, who contends she was a child prostitute, became a worldwide name when her story was written by The New York Times … Read more
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Until now, sexual violence against ethnic minorities during the Khmer Rouge era in this country went largely ignored. Now for the first time, the Cambodian Defenders Project, one of the oldest legal aid organizations here, has published first-person accounts of interviews with 105 men and women from ethnic Vietnamese, Khmer Krom, … Read more
PHNOM PENH — Kunthear Laut, a 33-year-old Cambodian woman, is a child of marital rape and a victim of two rapes as well as three attempts and at least five years of incest from her uncle. “A woman has to obey a man; otherwise he uses violence,” she said in an interview with PassBlue about … Read more
