DPA
Phnom Penh – The United States has threatened to freeze aid spending to Cambodia if the government pushes ahead with a highly controversial draft law designed to regulate civil society.
The comments were made by Flynn Fuller, the country head of the US government’s development agency USAID, during a closed meeting between the Cambodian government and donors in Phnom Penh on Wednesday.
The meeting assessed Phnom Penh’s progress in attaining a series of 20 benchmarks in areas such as judicial reform and land rights.
‘In these times of fiscal constraint, justifying increased assistance to Cambodia will become very difficult in the face of shrinking space for civil society to function,’ Fuller said, adding that the ‘excessively restrictive’ law would harm development.
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