Francophone Summit Turns Blind Eye To Cambodia's Cybercrime

The HRC confirms a wealth of other research that cybercrime on an industrial scale is taking place in Cambodia, as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The HRC finds that“endemic corruption, reliable protection by the government, and co-perpetration by party elites are the primary enablers of Cambodia's trafficking-cybercrime nexus.”

“Cambodian state institutions systematically and insidiously support and protect the criminal networks involved in transnational fraud and related human trafficking,” the report says.

Many of those accused of playing leading parts or obscured but purposeful roles in organized cybercrime are either connected with the ruling regime or are its core members.

Hun To, a cousin of Prime Minister Hun Manet, is a director of Huione Pay, a financial conglomerate which has been cut off from the US financial system due to its alleged role in cybercrime.

Ly Yong Phat, a permanent member of the central committee of the ruling Cambodian People's Party, was sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury in 2024 for human rights abuses of trafficked workers subjected to forced labor in online scam centers.

Cambodia's legal system, universally acknowledged as being completely under government control, is powerless to tackle the situation. It ranked 141 out of 142 countries globally in the 2024 World Justice Project Rule of Law Index. Among lower-middle-income countries, Cambodia ranks 38th out of 38.

The idea of a global French-speaking community is in itself a dubious colonial relic. During the colonial period, France concentrated the Southeast Asian version of its mission civilisatrice on Vietnam and paid relatively little attention to Cambodia and Laos, which together made up French Indochina.

French missionaries in the 19th century devised a system for transcribing the Vietnamese language into Roman letters, known as quoc-ngo, which became the national standard.

The use of Chinese characters to write Vietnamese was stamped out at French insistence. This was a compromise solution in face of the extreme view of some French colonialists that Vietnam should simply abandon its language with everyone being made to speak French.

There was no such romanization of the Khmer language, and the idea that Cambodia is a meaningful part of a“French-speaking world” is a tenuous fiction. Today, the OIF estimates that only about 3% of Cambodians speak French.

The historical Western focus on Vietnam as the region's main player continued into the post-Khmer Rouge period. During the 1990s, senior diplomats such as the US Ambassador to Cambodia Kenneth Quinn were specialists on Vietnam, not Cambodia.

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Quinn believed that the Hun Sen regime, a result of the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, was the best way to bring lasting peace and stability to Cambodia. With the country now recognized as a hub for state-protected organized cybercrime, the project has clearly not gone to plan.

The best possible outcome from the summit, which the organizers may hope for, would be for Cambodia to make a sustained effort to combat organized cybercrime. We can expect some high-profile raids on cyber-slavery compounds as part of the summit preparations.

However, previous Cambodian compound raids have left the organizers untouched, and the compounds have simply reappeared elsewhere in the country. Victims of human trafficking who thought they had been rescued by the Cambodian police were sold back into slavery.

The evidence that the compounds are operating under government protection indicates that the pattern is likely to be repeated. If the idea is to try to hold the summit in Cambodia to make amends for the disastrous French colonial record in Southeast Asia, this is hardly the way to do it.

David Whitehouse is a freelance journalist who has lived in Paris for 30 years. He has both French and British nationality.

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