Boosting female political representation at July’s national election was the topic of a round-table discussion attended by dozens of political-party representatives, though none from the ruling party, in Phnom Penh yesterday.

Civil-society groups are pushing for women to account for 30 per cent of successful candidates at the poll come July, while the government has long been party to a 2015 UN millennium development goal of 25 per cent of candidates at the commune level and 30 per cent in the National Assembly.

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.