Women are playing a more prominent role in Cambodian politics, according to women's rights activists and female politicians, even though the new fourth mandate of the National Assembly will again be a largely male affair.
To read the full article, please visit Phnom Penh Post's Website.

The coalition of women's rights groups has requested that the government introduce gender quotas as a means of increasing women's participation in politics, according to a statement released Monday by Gender and Development for Cambodia (GADC). The statement calls for the creation of gender-based clauses in the Organic Law, passed April 1.
To read the full article, please visit the Phnom Penh Post.

A coalition of local NGOs has called on the government to take action to increase the number of women involved in politics by 2015, despite women's representation in the National Assembly increasing from 13 percent to around one in five in the current mandate. The Committee to Promote Women in Politics (CPWP), which includes eight local election monitoring groups as members, applauded the recent increases, but said the government and political parties should set higher targets for women's involvement.

For 20 years, Mu Sochua has been a voice for exploited Cambodians. As the Vietnam War spread to Cambodia in 1972, the then 18-year-old was exiled, with no chance to say goodbye to her parents, who later vanished under the Khmer Rouge regime. She spent 18 years overseas, studying and working in Paris, the US and Italy and in refugee camps along the Thai–Cambodian border.
To read the full article, please visit the The Jakarta Post Website.

Poverty in Cambodia is caused by the failure of the government to combat corruption. The national budget allocated for the social sector – including health, education and rural development – is lost every year, thus putting human lives at great risk of neglect, deprivation and exposure to violence. Among the victims of neglect, deprivation and violence are women, female youths and children because of gender inequalities, discrimination and extreme forms of abuse such as sexual abuse, rape and trafficking.

Little of that has silenced Mu Sochua, a female parliamentarian belonging to the opposition Sam Rainsy Party. She has fired verbal salvos at the Hun Sen administration in her quest for justice. It is part of an over two-decade-long commitment to improve her war-torn country, beginning in 1991 with a fight for women’s rights.Sochua was only 18 years old and a fresh high school graduate when the U.S. war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia in 1972, plunging a country that had remained neutral into a conflict that lasted 20 years.

Although the number of media organisations have clearly increased since 1993, after the elections overseen by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia that ended decades of conflict, many Cambodians still see journalism as a 'man's world'. The Cambodian media are "still a very male-dominated industry," says Cambodia's English-language daily 'The Phnom Penh Post' editor-in-chief Seth Meixner.
For further reading, please visit IPS News website.