Policy Forum Pod

In a new Policy Forum Pod two leading experts shed some light on the disturbing human rights violations being committed on Phnom Penh’s homeless people in contemporary Cambodia. Cambodia is a country whose recent past was plagued by extreme violence: large-scale bombing, civil war, invasion and genocide, acts that in total killed more than two million people over two decades. But it’s also a country whose present appears to be plunging back into the human misery of its haunted past, with not only state-sanctioned, but state-perpetrated violence being carried out against some of its most vulnerable citizens. It’s violence that is being largely overlooked by the international community. It is a situation in which Phnom Penh’s homeless people are systematically being rounded up by police, their possessions arbitrarily destroyed, and they themselves are being deported to what are effectively concentration camps outside the capital where they are subjected to appalling conditions. This is part of a broader pattern