National flag of the Kingdom of Cambodia; Tep Sovichet, Wikimedia Commons; CC0
Did you know that the Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia can be accessed on Wikisource? Wikisource is a free library of source text and a sister-project of Wikipedia hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation based in San Francisco, CA.
Three years ago, I had trouble finding a copy of the Constitution in HTML/plain text format. Most of the copies available online at that time were in PDF format, some of which had issues with translation while others were in image-format making the text non-searchable. This is when I decided to upload the Constitutional Council’s English translation of the document on Wikisource.
This is the latest version of the Constitution, which contains the most recent amendment that elevates the National Election Commission to the status of a constitutional body from that of a statutory one.
The Law on Copyrights and Related Rights (2003) categorically excludes the constitution, legislation, sub-legislation and regulations from protection under the statute. These texts and their translations into other languages fall directly into the public domain.
Article 10 of the Law on Copyrights and Related rights
The following works shall not fall under any protection conferred by this law:
(a) Constitution, Law, Royal Decree, Sub-Decree, and any other Regulations;
(b) Proclamations (Prakas), decisions, certificates and other circulars issuing instructions issued by state organizations;
(c) Court decisions and other court warrants;
(d) Translation of those materials mentioned in the preceding paragraphs [a], [b], and [c] of this article; and
(e) Idea, formality, method of operation, concept, principle, discovery or mere data, even if expressed, described, explained or embodied in any work.
I am planning on uploading more statutory and regulatory texts on to Wikisource for easy availability to the public. If you wish to help out, send me a message via email anirudh [at] mekongresearch [dot] org.