In courts, it’s a man’s world
Lawyers, advocates and victims say gender imbalance impacting women
THE number of women in the Cambodian judicial system remains stubbornly low, new statistics compiled by the Cambodian National Council for Women show, with the detrimental effects of that imbalance felt throughout the court system.
According to statistics published earlier this month, just 14 percent of judges in the country are women, and that proportion has barely improved over time. In fact, in 2017 there was just one more female judge than the 37 in the entire country in 2013, and actually two fewer than in 2016. The higher up the court system one goes, the more skewed the imbalance, with just two women out of 29 Appeal Court judges, and three out of 22 in the Supreme Court, according to the Cam- bodian Bar Association.
Overall female representation among prosecutors is even lower, with just 23 in the country, making up 12 percent of the total – a 2 percent increase since 2013.
The imbalance goes beyond simply being an undesirable image for the Cambodian government, which has long vowed to increase female representation in its ranks. In interviews with The Post, women’s rights activists, lawyers and victims say it has created a host of problems, with female lawyers and prosecutors often
of the primary opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, but also heightened pressure on NGOs and the closure of many independent media outlets.
Last year, two Radio Free Asia journalists and an independent filmmaker were arrested on “espionage” charges, the fiercely independent Cambodia Daily newspaper was forced to close after being slapped with a $6.3 million tax bill and more than a dozen independent radio stations were taken off the air.
An Amnesty International report, also released yesterday, called the attack on the opposition and NGOs the “misuse of the criminal justice system” to hamper activities ahead of the July national elections, and also pointed to the silencing of radio frequencies and shuttering of news outlets.
Preap Kol, director of Transparency International ( TI) Cambodia, said it was not encouraging that Cambodia was at the bottom of Asean for the last three years, with only petty corruption related to public services seeing some improvement.
The Cambodian People’s Party-led government professed its commitment to tackling corruption after the party’s surprising near-loss in the 2013 elections, Kol said in an email, “But these improvements are much below the expectation of the general public especially when grand corruptions were not tackled effectively yet.”
He also agreed that consistent attacks on the media and NGOs, as witnessed during last year’s crackdown, hampered efforts to highlight corrupt practices.
The TI report cites data from the Committee to Protect Journalists that shows that from 2012, of the 368 journalists killed pursuing stories, 96 percent were from countries with corrupt public sectors.
The cut-off for being deemed “corrupt” is a score of 45 on the index – Cambodia has scored a consistent 21 over the past three years.
Anti-Corruption Unit chief Om Yentieng could not be reached yesterday.
But ruling party spokesman Sok Eysan was quick to dismiss the rankings, saying it did not matter where Cambodia was placed, only that the country was developing, a frequent government refrain.
Development, he maintained, “reflects that there is no corruption, and that it’s not like what they said”.