UPR46 Session Introductory Remarks

Cambodia’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session, currently taking place before the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Geneva, represents the highest-level assessment of Cambodia’s human rights problems that takes place before the international community. As such, it provides a uniquely effective international forum for “speaking truth to power” and for bringing international attention to the Hun Sen/Hun Manet government’s extensive and long-lasting human rights abuses. That is why the Cambodia UPR session before the United Nations deserves special attention and advocacy actions by the Khmer community.

This virtual Cambodia UPR public forum is designed to help provide the basis for those actions and results. It will bring together a panel of experts to help explain the Cambodia UPR process, why it is important, and what specific issues it is addressing. It also will summarize and explain the “responses” that the Hun Sen/Hun Manet government is making to the issues and concerns that UN Member States are voicing at the UPR public hearing. It provides a unique opportunity, concurrent with the actual UPR Cambodia hearing now taking place, for the Khmer community and NGO groups to participate and engage in the UPR process in a meaningful and more manageable way.

This “highlight reel” and advocacy platform for the Khmer and NGO communities allows us to register our concerns and views in a more accessible and effective way than the bureaucratic and long-winded actual UPR proceedings themselves. We can share and discuss the most vital pieces of information coming out of the Cambodia UPR hearing in our own concurrent and more time limited format.

Let’s start this virtual “highlight reel” summarization process by providing a short, fast and to the point summary review of the main issues and points that the UPR proceedings have raised, as a framework for our issue-oriented advocacy discussions. Researcher Inka Juslin will provide this short overview of the key issues raised by the UPR hearing.