The Community Empowerment and Legal Awareness Program (CELA) aims to address the significant barriers to just and inclusive development by empowering Cambodians to advocate for human rights change. The CELA program extends legal awareness and understanding to vulnerable and marginalized communities and builds the capacity of grassroots activists. The program is also helping to rectify the imbalance of power in Cambodia by nurturing networks of community advocates and supporting their mobilization and collective advocacy actions.
A Cambodian Guide to Defending Land and Housing Rights Project
 BABC and our partners, International Accountability Project and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, initiated A Cambodian Guide to Defending Land and Housing Rights project in 2008 with the goal of empowering communities threatened with development-induced displacement and breaking down the barriers they face to accessing critical information about their rights and means of defending them. The project aimed to develop a community educational resource covering rights, laws, and strategies for challenging forced displacement, as well as a nation-wide network of grassroots facilitators to impart the knowledge, skills and values contained in the guide.
A Cambodian Guide to Defending Land and Housing Rights (CG) was published and launched with a regional conference in October 2009. BABC is now working to develop further guides focused on risks, rights, laws, and strategies associated with specific displacement sectors, as well as guides that are aimed at developing skills and strategies for challenging forced displacement.
BAB Cambodia runs training of trainer courses to put these resources into action by training grassroots facilitators drawn from community networks that have emerged recently to collectively defend land rights and natural resources. The facilitators are trained through a series of 4-5 day Training-of-Trainer (ToT) workshops and are then supported to conduct community workshops for communities facing forced displacement and land conflict across the country. In addition to disseminating the information to these communities, the facilitators use the Guide as a tool for community mobilization and stimulating grassroots activism. The program provides small grants to community networks upon request for collective advocacy actions.
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A Guide to Personal Security for Human Rights Defenders
 In October 2010, Bridges Across Borders Cambodia launched its second major curriculum resource: A Guide to Personal Security for Human Rights Defenders. This resource was developed with the support of the Swedish Amnesty Fund and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Over recent years, BAB Cambodia has worked with many communities facing forced eviction and has observed both an increase in community-led advocacy and a corresponding increase in harassment of community activists. Human rights defenders across Cambodia face intimidation, threats, false prosecution and deprivation of liberty, and, in some cases, violent attack or even murder. The Guide was created to help these activists understand and appreciate the importance of security, and in turn, improve their ability to reduce security risks or mitigate problems that do arise.
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A Community Guide to the ADB Involuntary Resettlement Safeguards
 In June 2011, BAB Cambodia launched a popular education resource for communities affected by projects financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). A Community Guide to the ADB Involuntary Resettlement Safeguards is an action resource for communities facing displacement as a result of ADB-funded projects.
The ADB updated its Involuntary Resettlement Safeguard Policy in 2009. The key aims of this policy are to avoid and minimize displacement and to ensure that no one is made worse off as a result of a project funded by the ADB. A Community Guide to the ADB Involuntary Resettlement Safeguards seeks to make this policy understandable and accessible to affected communities and to impart the skills necessary for people to monitor the projects that affect them.
The Guide explains local grievance processes, the ADB Accountability Mechanism and other forms of advocacy that local communities can use to defend their rights and hold the ADB accountable if the policy is violated. An accompanying Facilitators’ Edition includes interactive activities and instructions for facilitators to run training sessions on each topic.
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Civics Education Project
The CELA program has been developing civics education curriculum for high school aged youth, called Introduction to Law, Human Rights and Democracy. This curriculum aims to challenge prevailing attitudes to government and inform people that the government has a duty to work for them and uphold their rights. It promotes an understanding of the system of constitutional democracy, and the concept that the rule of law should apply to everyone. It acknowledges that there are significant problems with the application of law and democracy in Cambodia, but it explains that the first step in working to improve the situation is to know and understand the law and how the system of constitutional democracy is meant to function.
Legal Studies Internship
The CELA program operates a legal internship program for Cambodian law students from the Royal University of Law and Economics and Pannasastra University Faculty of Law. The basis of the program is to expose law students from the country’s most prestigious universities to the circumstances that most Cambodians face everyday and encourage them to continue providing pro-bono legal services to the poor throughout their legal careers. Interns assist with legal research on various areas of Cambodian law, help prepare training materials and assist with workshop facilitation, translate legal documents, and monitor community workshops.
CELA also hosts international law students, who are paired up with Cambodian legal interns and work together on various legal tasks, including legal research, analysis, and curriculum development. Like the Cambodian interns, the international interns make valuable contributions to the work of the CELA program, while also learning a great deal by being exposed to social justice issues in Cambodia. The program provides an opportunity for law students from different sides of the world and different backgrounds to connect and learn from each other.
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