October 21, 2024,
We, the undersigned organisations, call upon World Bank President Ajay Banga to condemn the Cambodian government's assault on human rights groups, including reprisals against World Bank project stakeholders.
In recent months, there has been a worrying escalation in the Cambodian government’s repression of critical voices. This has included attacks on two prominent human rights groups, Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights (CENTRAL) and Equitable Cambodia. In both cases, the reprisals are linked to the groups’ legitimate human rights activities, and in particular to their efforts to ensure human and labor rights protections in projects supported by the World Bank Group.
We call on World Bank Group leadership to demand that these attacks be stopped and to use its leverage, consistent with its Position Statement on Retaliation Against Civil Society and Project Stakeholders, to ensure human rights defenders and civil society organizations in the country can continue their work without facing further reprisals.
Attack on leading labor watchdog
CENTRAL is one of Cambodia’s leading labor rights organisations. On June 28, 2024, the Ministry of Interior requested that the National Audit Authority of Cambodia (NAA) conduct an audit of CENTRAL and a “national security” audit was launched on July 15, 2024. The audit request came just weeks after CENTRAL published a report assessing the effectiveness of Better Factories Cambodia (BFC), a joint program between the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank aimed at improving working conditions in the garment sector by assessing the compliance of 660 participating factories with international labor standards. CENTRAL’s report found evidence that BFC was failing to identify freedom of association violations in participating factories and made several recommendations to improve BFC’s program, including by making their compliance reports available to workers and providing a grievance mechanism to allow workers to contest its findings.
The decision to launch a national security audit was preceded by escalating actions by government-aligned unions, including protests outside CENTRAL’s offices, legal complaints against CENTRAL’s staff, and petitions to the Cambodian government to investigate CENTRAL. The audit, which is clearly a response to CENTRAL’s report on the BFC project, has been roundly condemned by the American Apparel and Footwear Association and the Fair Labor Association (representing the apparel brands that source from Cambodia’s factories), United Nations Special Rapporteurs, and national and international civil society organizations. The ILO and IFC have yet to comment.
Attack on leading development watchdog
Eang Vuthy, Executive Director of the Cambodian land rights NGO Equitable Cambodia (EC), is facing baseless criminal charges due to his organisation’s advocacy on behalf of communities affected by harmful development projects. At the end of March 2024, Mr. Eang received a summons informing him that he had been charged with Incitement to Commit a Felony or Disturb Social Security—punishable by up to two years in prison—and ordered to appear before an investigating judge at Phnom Penh Capital Court for questioning on 4 April 2024.
Since 2012, Equitable Cambodia has played a key role in helping communities seek redress for human rights abuses caused by large-scale development and private investment projects—including several World Bank-backed projects—through strategic advocacy and litigation. As a result, the organization and Mr. Eang has faced years-long attacks and judicial harassment, including a defamation charge against him in August 2016 and a six-month-long suspension of the organization in 2017.
The latest criminal complaint against Mr. Eang, filed by the Ministry of Interior, is the most serious attack so far. Moreover, the charges concern Equitable Cambodia’s legitimate activities and day-to-day work supporting communities to file formal complaints to international accountability mechanisms to seek recourse for harms that they have suffered. These include a high-profile complaint regarding predatory lending and human rights violations caused by microfinance institutions backed by the IFC. The IFC’s Ombudsman was conducting its investigation mission on the case in March-April 2024, when Mr. Eang received his court summons notifying him that he had been criminally charged. He has strong reason to believe that the charges are a reprisal for this work.
A trial and conviction of Mr. Eang would set a dangerous precedent and would have very serious and far-reaching consequences for civil society in Cambodia.
Cambodia’s closing civil society space
These attacks are part of a broader crackdown on civil society that must be stopped before the last remaining democratic space in the country is closed.
In the years that followed the Paris Peace Agreements in 1991, which ended over two decades of war and horrific atrocities in Cambodia, a vibrant civil society and free press took hold and helped to advance a new era of democracy and human rights in the Southeast Asian nation. This began to change with the adoption of highly restrictive NGO and telecommunications laws in 2015. This was followed by a string of politically motivated prosecutions of opposition party leaders and elected officials, trade unionists and human rights defenders over the past decade, alongside the shutdown of over thirty independent news organizations. Since Hun Manet became Prime Minister last year, this crackdown on critical voices has escalated to target Cambodia’s leading non-partisan human rights organizations.
While the Cambodian government has a history of repressing and jailing members of the political opposition, the Ministry of Interior’s attempt to criminalize the otherwise legal day-to-day work of registered human rights NGOs and their leaders represents a new level of repression, that threatens the existence of all remaining independent NGOs in Cambodia that provide critical support to the most vulnerable people in the country.
The World Bank Must Speak Out
There are numerous international institutions that provide development assistance to Cambodia, and which have a responsibility to intervene in defense of Equitable Cambodia and CENTRAL, but perhaps none more than the World Bank Group. That is because the recent attacks are believed to be in retaliation for the organizations’ work addressing World Bank programs.
In 2018, IFC adopted a Position Statement on Retaliation Against Civil Society and Project Stakeholders, where it states that it does not tolerate any action by a client that amounts to retaliation – including threats, intimidation, harassment, or violence – against those who voice their opinion regarding the activities of IFC or its clients. In this statement, the bank notes that “respect for human rights includes the ability of stakeholders to engage freely with IFC and its clients.” In 2021 IFC also published a “Good Practice Note for the Private Sector, Addressing the Risks of Retaliation Against Project Stakeholders”, which outlines the steps that IFC’s clients should take to screen for, prevent and address reprisals.
We call upon World Bank President Ajay Banga to make clear to the Cambodian government that the Bank will enforce its policy of zero tolerance for retaliation. This means that, before approving any new investments in Cambodia, the World Bank Group Board should verify that the legal harassment of CENTRAL and Equitable Cambodia has stopped and its staff are able to continue to freely engage in their legitimate human rights activities in support of project-affected communities and workers.
