On 21 August 2007 Rick Snell (UTAS Law Graduate 1982) a Senior Lecturer in Law submitted a final report on behalf of the Law School and UTAS Innovation Ltd (the commercial arm of UTAS) to complete a consultancy for USAID.

Rick, in a hectic seven week period, working with a 16 member drafting team including 2 Generals and several Secretaries of State, helped finalise a draft policy on Access to Information for the Royal Government of Cambodia. Progress on this project had stalled for about two years prior to this burst of activity.

The work involved the drafting of the policy, numerous consultations including with Ministers and Generals and 3 public workshops including a national workshop with 130 invited representatives on the 25th July 2007 at the Phnom Penh Hotel.

The hardest part of the task for Rick was the need to quickly produce drafts so as to give ample time for the drafts to be translated into formal Khmer well before each meeting of the drafting team.

In the last three weeks of the consultancy, which coincided with the first three weeks of Semester 2, Rick spent each Sunday writing up a lecture for his Comparative Administrative Law class and reading the students’ weekly work that they emailed to him  each Friday night.

In an email to staff  Rick wrote “I would be interested in giving a staff seminar on my impressions of the Cambodian legal system if enough staff are interested. I stress impressions because I knew very little before I went there and even though my knowledge has developed it  still only sits in that basic “under construction” phase.

It is a fascinating system – if that word can be used in the context of Cambodia – Brad Adams  in “Cambodia’s Judiciary: Up to the Task?” wrote:

“More than ten years after the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements, Cambodia’s judiciary remains a  highly politicizied, under-educated, modestly trained and thoroughly corrupt institution. It competes with the military and  police as the official institution most widely scorned by the Cambodian public”

Rick ended the email with the observation that  “the judiciary is one of the more functional elements within the system.”

The full details of Rick’s adventures in Phnom Penh can be found on his blog via www.ricksnell.com.au