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Opinion: Digital Transformation Can Be Accountable and Transparent
- communicationinter3
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Future Forum's young research fellow, Aun Chhengpor, was published in Cambodianess on March 6, 2025. Check out the original article HERE, and read it below!
No country’s digital transformation has been greater than Cambodia’s. The country has enjoyed a sharp increase of internet use and digitalization of everything from mobile banking to political participation.
In response to the development, the government produced two policy documents in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic to outline its plan for fully digital government, business and citizens by 2035.
The plan is comprehensive and acknowledges the strength and shortcomings of the country’s digital policy process but lacks details on how to ensure the process can be transparent and accountable.
Why accountability and transparency?
Global debate on whether regulation can hurt innovation when it comes to digital technologies like artificial intelligence has concentrated in the case of the European Union’s priority on establishing rules and compliance requirements.
Critics have said the bloc’s multi-layered rules – from its Digital Service Act to AI Act among others – will hamper the tech industry and innovation from reaching its full potential.
However, supporters of the EU’s regulatory approach suggested such rules are needed to place human agency and protection at the centre of the shift toward a more digital and virtual future through data protection and people’s ownership and autonomy over the digital data collected and processed by the developers.
Accountability and transparency are not only applied on the part of developers and private sector alike, but also to the national and regional government, an approach described by the proponents as to create trust and confidence in technological progress when every stakeholder is kept in check and held accountable for every action vis-a-vis the tech industry and digital services.
Cambodia’s two important policy documents – the Digital Economy and Society Policy Framework and the Digital Government Policy – provided little mechanism to hold accountable the statutory multi-ministerial institutions regulating the tech and digital industry, including the National Digital Economy and Society Council and the Digital Government Committee.
Digitally Specialized Judiciary
Absent from the policy documents are the indispensable functions of two other important institutions – the legislative and the judiciary. Recent legislation on telecom and digital industry, including the drafted law on data protection and the drafted law on cybercrime, have listed processes that enable lawsuits against government decisions to the court of justice. However, according to the most recent global Rule of Law Index conducted by the World Justice Project in 2024, Cambodia was ranked 141st out of the 142 countries surveyed. Such an assessment was refuted by a government spokesperson.
To deal with the new context of a digital future in Cambodia, with new issues emerging for the Kingdom now in the near future – ranging from cyber-attacks, misuses of collected data, violation of digital privacy, and cyberbullies among others – Cambodian judiciary will get more involved. And there is a demand for the institution to be strengthened to deliver enhanced quality of service.
In the best case scenario, the 2014 Law on the Organization of the Courts needs amendments to fit into this new digital role. The organic statute of the Cambodian judiciary lists requirements to establish specialized courts (for the provincial level) and chambers (for upper courts) in the civil, criminal, commercial and labor affairs.
The new specialty that should be amended is digital affairs. A digital affairs specialty must be rapidly developed and established within the judiciary system, with magistracies and court workers being highly skilled and trained on digitally related cases.
Digitally Competent Parliament
The same can be said of the legislative branch. Currently, the parliamentary oversight on the digital sector is most likely to fall under Specialized Commission 9 of both the National Assembly and Senate due to its telecommunication portfolio.
However, due to digital transformation being multi-sectoral and multi-sectorial in nature, a special and select parliamentary commission is needed in both houses to oversee a more precise and better check on the National Digital Economy and Society Committee.
Lawmakers and their advisors should be somebody who has a broader understanding and knowledge on digital affairs, running from data governance to digital public infrastructure, and cybercrimes.
Their legal power and digital specialty will aid oversight to ensure greater deliverables on the government’s part with regards to planning and making better digital policies that put people at the center.
Public Process
To boost transparency and trust in Cambodia’s digital policy process, stakeholders can employ a playbook of previous legislation of the United Nations-supported drafted law on access to information, in which relevant actors and the public were given access to and were invited to comment on the draft documents.
Digital legislation and policy-making require an even higher degree of transparency and public involvement because every citizen is going to be exposed to digital services sooner or later.
This is the strong justification for them to be involved and given a say on regulatory, legislative and policy matters on the issue that directly affects them.
Chhengpor Aun is a research fellow at Cambodia’s public policy think tank Future Forum. This article was made possible through the support of the Center for International Private Enterprise via the project “Mitigating Corrosive Capital Impact by Improving Transparency in Infrastructure”.
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