Program on Rights and Justice in Cambodia (PRAJ)

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Name Of Organization: East-West Management Institute, funded by USAID

Project Title:  Program on Rights and Justice in Cambodia II (PRAJ II)

Project Location:  Cambodia

What are some of the key post-conflict challenges facing Cambodia today?

Cambodia has suffered decades of political volatility and civil war, including the devastating violence of the Khmer Rouge period that still scars the country. Over the past 10 years, a measure of stability and economic progress has been achieved, but significant challenges to development still remain: weak government institutions, displaced populations, an increased demand for natural resources, especially land, and a weak civil society.

What was EWMI's approach towards dealing with Cambodia's weak judicial institutions and the apparent lack of access to justice?

Building upon the success of its six-year predecessor, the Program on Rights and Justice in Cambodia (PRAJ), EWMI continues to promote access to justice, improve the professional standards of the future Cambodian legal community, and strengthen grassroots advocacy and community networks, including community-based advocacy to protect Cambodia's biodiversity.  New initiatives under EWMI's program include activities to improve the collection and use of justice system data and the creation of a new open data platform to promote transparency in Cambodia's resource development. 

Can you walk us through the implementation stages of the project?

Activity 1: Justice System Data

Data relating to the functioning and performance of the Cambodian judicial system is scarce, frequently uninformative, and often inaccessible. Data collected by the NGO community is also incomplete.  In order to develop more meaningful justice sector data and promote reform efforts, EWMI helped the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) launched several new data systems.  These include a database of trafficking-in-persons (TIP) cases, a gender-based violence database, and assistance to the Phnom Penh Municipal Court in establishing a pilot criminal case database that provides a mechanism for eliminating excessive pretrial detention and provides a basis for administrative accountability of the courts in processing criminal cases.

In the process of improving data sharing, EWMI has emphasized freedom of expression issues and with the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) to developed mechanisms to promote information. The shared data became a part of the CCHR pilot database and became the factual foundation for the Cambodian NGO submission to the UN Human Rights Council for Cambodia's Universal Periodic Review.  (Read More)

Activity 2:  Improving the Legal Education for Cambodian Youth

A key EWMI objective is to improve the quality of legal education at Cambodia's universities as well as to improve the quality of education offered by Cambodia's legal professional training schools and their in-service training programs so that the next generation of legal professionals may build lasting legal and judicial reform in Cambodia.  EWMI has emphasized practical skills training, instituting innovative national moot court and client counseling competitions that have proved very popular with students.

EWMI is also expanding the Alternative Dispute Resolution, Ethics, and Introduction to Advocacy classes it helped develop at the Royal University for Law and Economics (RULE), as well as working to extend the breadth of the existing English-language program at RULE. EWMI also has helped RULE establish the first Cambodian law journal.  (Read More)

Activity 3:  Outreach to Rural Communities to Expand Advocacy Efforts in Human Rights and Biodiversity

Despite widespread public dissatisfaction with Cambodia's legal system, judicial reform has yet to move large constituencies of ordinary citizens or business people to mobilize and take corrective action.  To address this discrepancy, EWMI provides grants to human rights and grassroots civil society organizations to actively investigate human rights violations, monitor detention centers and prisons, conduct human rights and legal awareness trainings, and provide legal representation to victims of human rights abuses, especially in land grabbing, land disputes, and forced evictions.  Yet in order to reach the rural communities beyond the Phnom Penh-based NGOs, NGOs must focus on issues that are important to the daily lives of these communities, such as land and livelihood exploitation.  Reaching these communities is essential for expanding the activist networks of NGOs which will bring a greater number and variety of voices into the reform dialogue, pushing the reform agenda forward.

An issue of critical concern to the rural Cambodians that has emerged is protecting Cambodia's natural biodiversity.  EWMI helps develop this concern into an effective advocacy campaign by supporting communities in conducting activities such as forest patrols, biodiversity monitoring, and the preparation of complaints.  EWMI supports several key constituent groups, including the Community Peacebuilding

Network (CPN) and its member groups, the Indigenous People's Working Group (IPWG) and Indigenous

Representatives Active Members (IRAM), IDEA (informal economy workers) and the Prey Lang Community Network (PLCN).

Activity 4:  Expanding Legal Aid Services to Increasing Access to Justice

EWMI provides assistance to the government to expand the reach of legal aid services and strengthen the capacity of Cambodia's existing legal aid NGO providers. EWMI currently provides grants to three local partners who provide legal aid to indigent clients: International Bridges to Justice (IBJ), Legal Aid of Cambodia (LAC), Legal Services for Children and Women (LSCW), and the Vishnu Law Group (VLG), an innovative new public interest law firm. The Returnee Integration Services Center (RISC) supports deportees from the United States who are repatriated to Cambodia, often arriving with no Khmer language skills or known relatives.  RISC provides assistance in establishing legal status and identity, as well as assisting with practicalities such as locating relatives and lining up vocational training.

In recent years, EWMI also provided the Women's Media Center (WMC) a grant to create a six-part television drama series designed to educate Cambodians about their legal system. EWMI also created a database of Supreme Court judgments from 1996 to 2006 - ”the first such collection available to legal professionals and academics in Cambodia“ which has enabled users to have access to a large body of jurisprudence.

EWMI continues to support the Legal Aid Lawyer Working Groups that attract a significant number of Cambodia's legal aid lawyers. The meetings allow practitioners to discuss common problems and serve as an effective vehicle for formal continuing legal education and refresher skills training.

Assessing the project's accomplishments, what would you say were some of the project's greatest impacts?

EWMI has continued its highly successful and well-publicized annual law student competitions, the Client Counseling Competition and the Mock Trial Competition. Each year EWMI sends the winning team to the annual International Client Counseling Competition (ICCC), held most recently in Dublin, Ireland.  For the past four years, a Cambodian team has made it to the semi-finals of the competition, finishing ahead of teams from Canada, New Zealand, Finland, Hong Kong and Scotland, among other countries.   This is a remarkable achievement given that the ICCC is an English-language competition.    This program has engendered critical thinking and evidence-based decision making in thousands of students through trial skills/mock trial programs.  (Read More)

Perhaps EWMI's most focused effort to promote civic participation in the protection of land and livelihoods has been its work in support of the Prey Lang Community Network, which has been striving to protect Prey Lang Forest from illegal land-grabbing and concessions.  While the threat to Prey Lang remains severe, community activists have made significant progress in the past five years.  They have developed a vision for forest protection and development, launched community management and protection initiatives, submitted petitions to the government, provided input on policy proposals, and garnered significant international and national media coverage. 

Using new data technologies to promote change has been one of the most impactful aspects of PRAJ II.  EWMI has created an "open data" platform called Open Development Cambodia (www.opendevelopmentcambodia.net), designed to promote transparency in Cambodia's resource development and based on neutral, open data standards to establish credibility. ODC aggregates a database of maps, reports, latest news and innovative visuals to objectively reveal the environmental and social implications of economic development in Cambodia.  ODC data therefore is critical for communities seeking objective information about proposed development initiatives and can serve as the basis for fact-based advocacy by community groups.  It is also a valuable tool for government development planners and prospective private investors.

In a similar vein, EWMI has worked with one of its local partners, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR), to develop sithi.org, a shared online human rights database. Accessed by 3000 new users each month, the web portal represents a dramatic shift in civil society access to rights documentation through its shared mapping of human rights violations and land concessions. As evidence of this project's impact, the CCHR won the Information Society Innovation Fund 2011 Award under the category of 'Rights and Freedoms' for sithi.org's role in advocating for social change and in promoting the civil and political rights of Cambodian citizens.

Finally, EWMI's emphasis on developing justice data  has helped to double the prosecution clearance rate in cases of gender based violence.  Prosecutions were monitored in 2010 and the data showed that the prosecution clearance rate was only 16%, compared to over 80% for other criminal cases.  This injures society by robbing courageous survivors from receiving justice and reinforcing the belief in Cambodian communities that the rule of law does not protect them.  When this data was brought to the MoJ, they worked with the Ministry of Women's Affiars (MoWA) to design a year long, evidence-based training program to improve the success of prosecutions, training over 500 justice sector officials and legal aid lawyers in the process.  The positive impact of the program was evident when the clearance rate doubled to 32% in 2011.  This is a good start to improving due process and justice for survivors of GBV.  (Read More).  The development  of the MoJ's database of TIPs cases, along with training in its use and a national conference on the legal provisions related to these cases (also supported by EWMI) led to a tripling of reported TIPs prosecutions.

What lessons did you learn from this project? What recommendations can you offer to other individuals and/or organizations seeking to address this problem in Liberia or other regions of the world ?

This project continues to reveal valuable lessons for program geared towards legal education and human rights.  We learned it is beneficial to emphasize the importance of focusing on legal education and preparing the next generation of lawyers to practice law in a professional and ethical fashion.  On the human rights side, we discovered the value of promoting networking and information sharing among community groups and CSOs and using evidence-based advocacy and the development of transparent and objective platforms for disseminating data to that end (such as ODC).  As this project winds down we look forward to further reflection upon the knowledge we have gained and how best to apply it to future endeavors.