CEO News: It is apparent that since Cambodian authorities declared their "war on drugs" in 2017, that large numbers of small time drug users are being arrested and incarcerated. There are so many of them that relatively few cases are reported by CEO News.
CEO thread from December 2016:
Gov't crackdown on drugs to begin 1 Jan 2017.
newsworthy/gov-crackdown-drugs-begin-ja ... own%202017


On 12 May 2020, Amnesty International released a detailed report on the results of the "drug crackdown" that began in 2017 and which continues today. It's a long read, but is divided into chapters; available on one of the two links below, with a language selection on the first link.

Cambodia: Substance abuses: The human cost of Cambodia’s anti-drug campaign Amnesty International (Press Release)
Cambodia: Substance abuses: The human cost of Cambodia’s anti-drug campaign

12 May 2020, Index number: ASA 23/2220/2020

In January 2017 the Cambodian government launched a massive anti-drug campaign. The campaign’s overwhelming emphasis on detention and prosecution – rather than ensuring access to adequate healthcare for people who use drugs – has led to an escalating public health crisis. As this report details, the anti-drug campaign has not only failed in its primary mission of reducing drug use and drug-related harms, it has led to serious and systematic human rights violations. These violations include not only what amounts to a systematic denial of the right to health, but also arbitrary arrests and detention, wrongful convictions, and torture and other ill-treatment.
Choose a language to view report
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https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/as ... 0/2020/en/

PDF link direct to document in English:
https://www.amnesty.org/download/Docume ... NGLISH.PDF

Cambodia's forgotten war on drugs enters fourth year
More than 50,000 arrested on suspicion of using or selling narcotics: Amnesty
SHAUN TURTON and KONG META, Contributing writers
May 13, 2020 14:13 JST

PHNOM PENH -- In the predawn darkness of Aug. 8 last year, Nuth Sopheap arrived at a police station and saw her son Minea in handcuffs. The 19-year-old would not look his mother in the eye.

Hours before, by a roadside not far from his family's home in Kandal, the province that rings the capital, Phnom Penh, Minea had been arrested with a friend. The latter, Sopheap would find out later, was found carrying a small amount of methamphetamine.

Via a relative, Sopheap was soon told the "negotiating" price -- the bribe required to secure her son's release from police custody -- was $300. It had been three years since Sopheap, for health reasons, left her job as a seamstress at a garment factory. Her husband's income from delivering vegetables to market barely supported the family.

"I was totally broke," Sopheap, 41, told the Nikkei Asian Review last week at the family's house, where she lives with her husband and 13-year-old daughter. Minea is in Phnom Penh's main prison -- which is 500% over capacity -- awaiting a trial date.

"This drug campaign, it's arresting for the sake of arresting, it's not to help. It is targeted at poor people. Big people, they don't go to jail. If they arrest the rich kids, they can afford to offer the money straight away."

In January 2017, weeks after meeting with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Cambodia's Prime Minister HE launched his country's own war on drugs.

While Duterte's deadly drug war has drawn widespread condemnation, Cambodia's campaign -- first announced as a six-month crackdown, but now entering its fourth year -- has gone largely unmarked by the international community.

In a report released Wednesday, Amnesty International details the "rising tide" of human rights abuses linked to the prolonged clampdown which, it says, targets the "poor and marginalized." Through interviews with 51 people detained during the crackdown, the group describes cases of wrongful arrest, torture and allegations of fatal beatings in custody.
Full article: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Cambod ... ourth-year

May 14, 2020
Government rejects NGO report on “war on drugs”

The government criticised a report released by Amnesty International on their website yesterday. The report speaks about human rights violations committed over the government’s “war on drug” campaign. It has resulted in tens of thousands of people being arrested since it started in 2017.

Chin Malin, spokesman of the Justice Ministry and vice-chairman of the Cambodian Human Rights Committee said yesterday: “We do not deny [report], but we are still doubtful of the accuracy of the report. How did they do their research, collect information and come to their conclusion?”

He said the report of Amnesty International has no scientific basis and doubts the accuracy of their sources for the interviews they conducted.

Mr. Malin questioned whether the civil rights group discussed with relevant parties, especially the anti-drug authorities which is in charge of preventing and reducing drug cases in the Kingdom.

“What they state are all illegal acts like torturing, arresting arbitrarily, including officials abusing their power. If they have the evidence, please show it to us; which are the cases and then make a report to the government. We will look into it further and take legal action if deemed necessary,” he said.

“If their intention is to prevent human rights violation and drug trafficking, they should have a round table discussion with the government presenting the facts. Action will be taken against those who are guilty of committing wrongful acts,” Mr. Main said.

The new 78 page report titled, “Substance abuses: The human cost of Cambodia’s anti-drug campaign released yesterday on their website [Wednesday,13] said: how the authorities prey on poor and marginalized people, arbitrarily carry out arrests, routinely subject suspects to torture and other forms of ill-treatment, and dispatch those who can’t buy their freedom to severely overcrowded prisons and pseudo “rehabilitation centers” in which detainees are denied healthcare and are subjected to severe abuse.

Amnesty International, Cambodia said the report is based primarily on field research carried out in November and December 2019 when they conducted interviews with 51 people, including 34 people who currently use or previously used drugs.
https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50722895/g ... -on-drugs/

More commentary on the report here:
Amnesty International: Cambodia’s war on drugs an ‘unmitigated disaster’
Andrew Haffner, SEA Globe
14 May 2019

The Amnesty study, which documents conditions mounting since Prime Minister HE announced three years ago an official crackdown on narcotics trafficking, paints both systems in a harsh light. It’s not the first to do so – a 2013 study by Human Rights Watch alleged many of the same issues and abuses years before the prime minister’s enhanced approach.

Echoing accusations made in that earlier report was Naran, a middle-aged recyclable scavenger by trade and one of the 51 people who spoke with Amnesty investigators late last year. She told the organisation’s researchers that “to be a drug user is to be treated like an animal”.

What’s more, Naran’s experience suggests the law-and-order approach to drug users may only scare them off from medically approved treatment.

Naran, who was in drug treatment at the time of her arrest, said she was detained in Phnom Penh outside the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital, which administers methadone services for rehabilitation from opioid addiction.

“Regardless whether we had anything or not, they just arrested everyone,” she told Amnesty. “Nobody in the group had any drugs. I showed them my card that says I am receiving methadone treatment. The clinic staff told me before that if social affairs [officers] or police come to arrest [me], I can show them my card and they won’t arrest me. But when I showed them my card, they didn’t listen to me and they tore my card in half in front of my face.”

https://southeastasiaglobe.com/amnesty- ... -disaster/

15 May 2020
The war on drugs is a war on human rights

One of the most appalling aspects of the war on drugs is that it can legitimise not just human rights abuses, but a complete rejection of human rights as a principle. The degree to which this perverse reality has been normalised was made clear in a recent statement by the Cambodian Ministry of the Interior, responding to a new report from Amnesty International.

‘When it is an anti-drug campaign,’ the spokesman said, ‘there is never a respect for human rights.’ He went on to say that during an anti-drugs campaign ‘human rights need to be put aside, so it is clean’.

Let that sink in for a moment.


In some respects, we all know that this is the reality on the ground. From the mass incarceration of people involved in drugs in the United States, to the thousands of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, drug prohibition has a corrosive effect on human rights.

The United Nations recognises this fact. A 2019 report from the UN Systems Coordination Task Team was explicit that ‘abusive, repressive and disproportionate drug control policies and laws are counterproductive, while also violating human rights, undercutting public health and wasting vital public resources’. In the same year the new international guidelines on human rights and drug policy set out a framework for reducing the harms current policy creates.

But there remains something chilling whenever we hear governments making the case against human rights so starkly, because they do so in the knowledge that the dehumanisation of people who use or supply illicit drugs is legitimised by prohibition. The world over, regimes know that if they want to ignore human rights without sanction, then clamping down on drugs provides the necessary cover.

For that reason, we are delighted that Amnesty International published this report – and , in doing so, has taken a firm stance against global prohibition. The report lays out in detail the horrors inflicted on Cambodian people under the guise of a drugs clampdown. It makes for difficult reading, and sadly we know that what it documents is mirrored in the Philippines and many other countries. As long as the green light for abuse is provided by prohibition, these are precisely the grim effects we can expect.

From the perspective of drug policy reformers, it may seem odd that Amnesty has not taken such a clear position sooner. However, it perhaps reflects the extent to which human rights abuses are so normalised by prohibition that, hiding in plain sight, even leading human rights groups haven’t always addressed the connection. Amnesty stepping so firmly into this arena will undoubtedly go a long way to changing that.

Today’s report is absolutely clear. It states that ‘the “war on drugs” has effectively been a war on people, in particular the poorest and most marginalised sectors of society, and has undermined the rights of millions of them.’ It goes on to say that ‘Years of evidence from countries in every region of the world undercut the logic of the “war on drugs” and has contributed to the current shift in understandings of drug policy.” The message is clear and unambiguous: the war on drugs is a war on human rights.
https://transformdrugs.org/the-war-on-d ... an-rights/

Amnesty report on Cambodia from May 2020:
Cambodia: Abusive “war on drugs”, rife with torture and corruption, must be overhauled
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/ ... verhauled/