The Confines of the Rule of Law in Contemporary Cambodia: Political Culture and Legal-Institutional Framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rule of law objectives have assumed an integral role in post-Cold War democratisation initiatives and state-building operations. More than US$10 billion has been spent by the international community on democratic state-building in Cambodia since the Paris Peace Agreements (PPA) were signed in 1991 and the deployment of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) (1992-93). While the 1993 Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia provides for a democratic government with separation of powers, judicial independence and human rights guarantees consistent with international legal instruments, Cambodia continues to rank poorly in international indices of the rule of law. This dissertation investigates the deficient application of the rule of law in Cambodia against the standard provided for by the text of the 1993 Constitution and the legal-institutional framework it established. The study assesses Cambodia’s performance in this area of governance against a conceptual framework for a ‘thin’, procedural rule of law consistent with the country’s civil law system and institutional structure. To investigate the rule of law in Cambodia, interviews were conducted with spokespersons for the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of Justice, National Assembly members, judges, lawyers, international and local non-government organisations, independent researchers and foreigners working within the Cambodian legal sector. The dissertation argues that the deficient application of the rule of law in Cambodia is attributable to the combination of the country’s political culture of patron-clientelism and the legal-institutional framework established during the UNTAC period. The dissertation finds that despite decades of internationally-sponsored good governance and judicial reform efforts, Cambodia is deficient across all indicators of a thin rule of law. The constitutional arrangements established during the UNTAC period provide for a parliamentary system, where the executive is embedded in the legislature, and the basic framework for a civil law system, which remains underdeveloped. In the Cambodian political context, this enables control of the legislature by the hegemonic Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). In a civil law system, the purpose of the judiciary is to give expression to the will of the legislature, as statutes are the primary source of law. The legal system in Cambodia, in turn, gives expression to the will of the CPP. The result of this is endemic corruption and political interference in the judiciary according to international standards of good governance and the rule of law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".