The Constitutional Council announced that three judicial laws passed by the National Assembly in May and the Senate in June are constitutional.

Civil society groups had called on the council last month to declare the laws unconstitutional, saying they would only serve to undermine court independence.

“We now call on the King to give due consideration to our concerns that the laws will do nothing but reinforce the control of the judiciary by the executive,” Duch Piseth of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights said yesterday.