Amnesty International (Author): “The State of the World's Human Rights; Cambodia 2025”, Document #2139254

Background

The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) continued to rule Cambodia, which remained a one-party state backed by the military and with tight control over the judiciary. Cambodia and Thailand engaged in military conflict along their shared border, resulting in civilian deaths on both sides.

Forced labour and torture and other ill-treatment

Slavery, human trafficking, forced labour, child labour, deprivation of liberty and torture and other ill-treatment were recorded in more than 50 compounds across the country where online scamming or gambling was occurring.¹ At these sites, victims of human trafficking, including children, were subjected to threats of violence and torture, forced to work and confined inside compounds.

People were brought from around the world, forced to cross borders by boats and traverse rivers and jungles, so that traffickers could sell them into compounds where they were then confined and exploited. Torture and other ill-treatment were used to discipline and control people within the compounds. Several compounds used “dark rooms” to punish people who had contacted the authorities or failed to meet work targets. Victims also suffered unlawful deprivation of liberty, imprisoned in guarded buildings designed to prevent their escape, with restricted contact with the outside world. Many victims were bought and sold, and enslaved while inside the compounds.

In July, the prime minister launched a nationwide crackdown on scamming compounds, reportedly freeing more than 3,000 victims in raids across the country. However, these attempts to stop online scamming appeared to be performative: less than 20% of the identified scamming compounds were investigated and in some instances trapped victims were not released. There appeared to be minimal efforts to properly identify or assist victims of trafficking and investigate or prosecute those responsible for human rights abuses.

The drastic cuts to USAID funding devastated the anti-human trafficking sector, leaving it without resources during the country’s worst human trafficking crisis to date.

Freedom of expression and assembly

Civil society

In April, the Supreme Court denied bail to five Mother Nature Cambodia activists who were imprisoned in 2024, along with other members, for advocating for environmental rights. The imprisoned activists were given lengthy sentences and were transferred to different prisons, an additional act of cruelty intended to separate them from each other and their families.

Group trials began in September for 37 individuals who had been arbitrarily arrested and held in pretrial detention for allegedly protesting against the establishment of a regional development zone more than a year earlier. The development zone was later abandoned because of pressure from the protests, yet the individuals remained in detention.

In August, the Kandal Provincial Court charged Chheng Sreyrath, a well-known online vendor, with “inciting discrimination” and “demoralizing the army”. In October, a tour guide from the city of Siem Reap was charged with conspiracy to commit treason by overthrowing the government after he posted a video of the revolution in Nepal.

Journalists

Journalists continued to bear the brunt of the government’s relentless attack on freedom of expression. In January, two journalists from government-aligned media outlets were arrested after attempting to expose a scamming compound. (This continued the trend from 2024 when award-winning journalist Mech Dara, known for investigating scamming compounds, was arrested in retaliation for exposing the industry.)

The government closely monitored media coverage of the Cambodian-Thai border conflict and arrested a journalist for livestreaming at the border. In August, the government revoked the media licence of news outlet Sara NCC Daily, supposedly for “false information which threatened national security”.

Politicians

In January, Lim Kimya, a former opposition politician and government critic, was murdered in Bangkok in what was believed to be a political assassination ordered from Cambodia.² The transnational killing of a Cambodian politician in Thailand alarmed government critics living there. In October, Ekkalak Paenoi was found guilty of the murder of Lim Kimya, in a trial held in Thailand. His alleged accomplices, identified in videos as Cambodian individuals with ties to Cambodian officials, remained at large.

Right to a healthy environment

In July, the government published its updated NDC, setting a conditional economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions reduction target of up to 55% by 2035.

Large-scale carbon-offset projects in forests proceeded without genuine free, prior and informed consent. Indigenous Peoples faced forced evictions, crop destruction and criminalization of traditional livelihoods because the projects excluded them from their ancestral lands.

The authorities encouraged companies to conduct sand dredging along the Mekong River. This threatened ecosystems by rapidly lowering river beds and destabilizing riverbanks, intensifying salinity intrusion and degradation of spaces vital for fisheries and agriculture.

Arbitrary deprivation of nationality

In August, an amendment to the Constitution enabled revocation of citizenship for people convicted of treason or collusion with foreign powers. The measures were an attempt to intimidate and silence critics following mass arrests and the earlier alleged assassination of Lim Kimya, raising concerns of further violations of international human rights law.³

Ethnically Vietnamese people living in Cambodia continued to face the risk of becoming stateless. The authorities continued to withdraw or refuse to issue identity, residence and naturalization documents, leaving people without the means to prove their Cambodian nationality. In many cases these people’s circumstances were akin to statelessness. Removal of citizenship or identity papers appeared to be part of an arbitrary and often ethnically motivated policy.

Right to housing

Forced evictions at the Angkor temple complex remained halted since 2023, due to pressure from civil society. Many families who had been forcibly evicted from the site continued to face debt and lacked access to adequate housing or any form of relief or remedy. Following a monitoring mission to the Angkor relocation sites, UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre found that the government-led evictions – which Amnesty International found were illegal under international human rights law – complied with local law.

Thousands of families across the country remained indebted to predatory micro-finance institutions that forced them into poverty, food insecurity and child labour, and having to sell their home and land.

Indiscriminate attacks

In May, clashes broke out along the Cambodia-Thai border, in an escalation of a long-standing territorial dispute. Evidence suggested that both Cambodia and Thailand may have carried out indiscriminate attacks harming civilian infrastructure.⁴ By December, over 40 people had been killed, with both sides suffering civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects, including a health centre, a pagoda and civilian homes in Cambodia. Scamming compounds were targeted by Thai authorities, endangering victims of human trafficking.

A second ceasefire was agreed on 27 December. Thousands of Cambodian families did not return or were unable to return to their homes, in some cases because of the Thai military presence in Cambodia. Further humanitarian concerns arose as scores of migrants returned to Cambodia from Thailand, and thousands of Cambodians remained internally displaced without access to adequate shelter, food and water.

Women’s rights

Women’s representation declined after the 2023 elections, falling to 13% in parliament, despite making up 42% of the civil service. Women remained at risk of gender-based violence and discrimination in employment.