Civil Society Plans to Present Anti-Corruption Petitions to the Government

12th April 2008
By Sok Serey
Radio Free Asia
Translated from Khmer by Khmerization

Cambodian Civil Society Alliance Against Corruption, which has 40 organisations as its members, plans to present about one million petitions and thumbprints to the government in early May in order to pressurise the current or new government elected after the July election to speed up the ratification of Anti-Corruption Laws, as the people and donor countries have waited for these laws for more than 10 years.
The source said that currently, the Alliance had collected 650,000 thumbprints and, added to the more than 300,000 thumbprints that it collected in 2006, it now has more than 950,000 thumbprints to present to the government. It hopes to have more than 1,000,000 thumbprints by May, when a campaign of thumbprints collections, which re-started in December 2007, end in May.
Mr Young Kim Eng, president of the Centre for Population, Development and Peace in Cambodia has told Radio Free Asia that: “It is very important because we want to push for a ratification of these (Anti-Corruption) laws. It’s been a long time coming. On the other hand, the government had made many promises to the donor countries on numerous occasions, but at the end these laws have still not been ratified.”
He said that the drafts of the Anti-Corruption Laws are still in the hands of the government and have not yet been sent to the National Assembly for ratification.
Mr Khieu Kanharith, a government spokesman, said that the government will accept those petitions and thumbprints, if they are presented to the government. He said: “We will accept them, but we already have the drafts of these laws. Which parts do they want to change? Or maybe they haven’t read the drafts and, when the National Assembly approved them, then they want to change something?”
Mr Sam Rainsy, leader of the opposition, has repeatedly criticised the long delay in the ratification of these Anti-Corruption Laws. He said: “Because the sooner the Anti-Corruption drafts become laws, the sooner they, the corrupt officials themselves, cannot commit corruption any anymore.”
Mr Kem Sokha, leader of the Human Right Party, said that: “It’s time that the government wake up. We’ve seen that the government is heading in an opposite direction against the trends that the people are heading. And these trends didn’t just come from the Khmer people only, even the international community wish to see the Anti-Corruption Laws ratified as well.”
The anti-corruption petitions and thumbprints to speed up the Anti-Corruption Laws was launched by the US ambassador Joseph Mussomelli in Kratie province in January.
Mr Hong Kim Sourn, a lawyer working for an NGO in Cambodia, said that currently Cambodia is using penal codes written by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia to prosecute corruption cases, but those laws have too many loopholes because they have not been defined clearly and in details what constitutes corruption. //