This photo shows Cambodian Oeuth Ang (L), an unemployed ex-soldier who calls himself "Meet to Kill", sitting in a prison truck upon his arrival at Phnom Penh municipal court on March 23, 2017. (Photo: AFP)

Gerald Flynn
02/06/2020

Of the 40,000 or so total number of prisoners in Cambodian facilities, Savna estimates that just 27 percent have been fully sentenced, while a further 30 percent have been convicted but are still caught in the bureaucracy of Cambodia’s convoluted appeals system.

While Cambodia appears to have been spared the fate of many countries, the COVID-19 pandemic may not have claimed any lives here yet, but it should serve as a wake-up call for the government to address the ticking time bomb of its prison system

“COVID-19 could serve as an impetus for reform of prison systems, but so far there’s been no political will among governments across Southeast Asia to do so,” concedes Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. “

“Cambodia’s prison overcrowding has been disastrous for years, causing all sorts of sickness among prisoners, but the Cambodian government has totally disregarded critics who proposed alternatives to lessen crowding,” Robertson notes.

Speaking with Cambodianess, Nouth Savna, spokesperson for the Interior Ministry’s General Department of Prisons, was frank about shortcomings in the country’s prison system—a system that he estimates currently houses close to 40,000 inmates but was designed to hold just 26,593.

There is a consensus among NGOs that courtrooms are congested due to a lack of human resources, a general carelessness on the part of the relevant authorities and no real oversight or monitoring enforced to keep them in check.

“The biggest problem is the huge number of people…being held in pre-trial detention for minor crimes, including non-violent political activities, and the system has failed to find an alternative to locking them up for months or years

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