Participants release balloons as they celebrate international Human Rights Day at Freedom Park in Phnom Penh in this file photo from 2019. - PPP
PHNOM PENH (Xinhua): Cambodia said on Thursday (March 23) that the "US Department of State's 2022 Human Rights Report on Cambodia" was downright unfounded, biased, and prejudicial as to its political nature.
"The US Department of State's Annual Human Rights Reports on other countries, including Cambodia, exposes blatantly a double standard in its practice, particularly in the absence of its own country report," the Cambodian Foreign Ministry's spokesperson said in a press statement.
"The United States with more than two hundred years of its own version of democracy still encounters on a daily basis systematic human rights abuses, among them racism, hate crimes, mass shootings and police brutalities, prison abuses, millions of pandemic-related fatalities, death penalties, and the lack of rights to abortion, to name just the major ones," the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said the double standard is so obvious in the specific instance when the US authorities pursued legal action against more than 1,000 individuals allegedly involved in the Capitol Hill insurrection.
"Ironically, in a similar situation in Cambodia, the report highlighted them as a mass trial to silence the dissenting views," the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also said that the government's commitment to promoting and protecting human rights remains as strong as ever.
