Bio

“War and genocide took me away from my native Cambodia when I had just completed high school, in 1972…I left my war-torn country as a young adolescent and returned 18 years later as a mother and an activist, working with women’s networks and human rights organizations to promote peace and to include strong provisions in the 1993 Constitution to protect the human rights of women…I have been tirelessly dedicated to this cause ever since.”

Mu Sochua is considered the most prominent woman in Cambodia’s leading political opposition, the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) www.samrainsyparty.org. SRP is Cambodia’s leading party battling for access to economic opportunities, better implementation for social programs and outlets for greater political participation. A February 2010 New York Times article titled ‘Crusader Rowing Upstream in Cambodia’ explained that Sochua is “part of a new generation of women who are working their way into the political systems of countries across Asia and elsewhere, from local councils to national assemblies and cabinet positions.”

For more than 25 years, Mu Sochua has been a leading human rights advocate. She has worked forcefully to prioritize women’s issues in the wake of Cambodia’s decades of tragedy. Joining with local and international actors, she has been working to stop human trafficking, child abuse, domestic violence, worker exploitation, corruption and government oppression.

Mu Sochua is currently battling governmental abuse of power in her own case, where she faces a possible jail term if the Cambodian Supreme Court upholds her criminal defamation conviction for criticizing the Prime Minister. Her case has been denounced internationally as a politically-motivated prosecution that violated principles of due process and freedom of expression (please follow this link to the Cambodian Center for Human Rights’s legal analysis of the case)

Read Mu Sochua’s full biography here.

To read news articles on Sochua, click here.