The lack of meaningful justice sector data in Cambodia significantly hampers reform efforts. Data relating to the functioning and performance of the Cambodian judicial system is scarce, frequently uninformative, and often inaccessible. Data collected by the NGO community is also incomplete. PRAJ II has begun working with both the government and with Cambodian human rights NGOs to improve the collection and use of statistics and information.

EWMI and the Ministry of Justice have launched the MoJ Justice Documentation Training Program, an intensive four-month training series that will focus on developing MoJ staff skills to support planned improvements in Ministry information systems: a Justice Statistics Database to track court information such as caseloads and clearance rates, an MoJ office Intranet for file-sharing and email communication, and a webpage to raise the transparency of the work of the courts.

In its work with human rights NGOs to improve data sharing, EWMI has emphasized freedom of expression issues and began work with the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) to develop mechanisms to promote information sharing in this area. In less than three months, CCHR was able to bring together a large number of NGOs through workshops and informal communications to share data and analysis related to freedom of expression violations in Cambodia. There were 26 participants in all and they included all the major human rights advocacy and monitoring groups as well as key trade unions. The shared data became a part of the CCHR pilot database and became the factual foundation for the Cambodian NGO submission to the UN Human Rights Council for Cambodia’s Universal Periodic Review.