A Cambodian court has charged four environmental advocates with insulting the king and plotting against the government, an official said on Monday, after three of them were arrested for documenting waste run-off into a river.
Use of royal defamation laws in Cambodia is a relatively new phenomenon, with the legislation only enacted in 2018.
The three environmentalists — Sun Ratha, Ly Chandaravuth and Yim Leanghy of advocacy group Mother Nature — were on Wednesday arrested for documenting the draining of waste into Phnom Penh’s Tonle Sap River.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Over the weekend, they were “charged with conspiracy to plot and for insulting the king,” Phnom Penh Municipal Court spokesman Plang Sophal said by text message on Monday.
Also charged was Mother Nature cofounder Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, a Spanish environmentalist who was deported from Cambodia in 2015 after he criticized the government’s plans for a controversial dam.
Sophal did not elaborate on why the environmentalists were hit with those particular charges.
While Cambodia has a constitutional monarch, King Norodom Sihamoni, it is ruled by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, Asia’s longest-serving leader.
In 2018, the enactment of the lese majeste laws triggered alarm from rights groups, who said that they could be used to target dissent.
If sentenced, the Mother Nature environmentalists face a maximum penalty of five years in prison for insulting the king, as well as 10 years behind bars for the conspiracy charge.
US Ambassador to Cambodia Patrick Murphy said he was “very troubled” to hear about the arrests.
“Documenting pollution is a public service, not terrorism,” Murphy wrote on Twitter on Monday. “We urge authorities to be responsive to its citizens, not to silence them.”
Last week, the US embassy condemned the “worsening” situation in Cambodia and announced that it was redirecting millions in funds from government entities to local non-governmental organizations.
Mother Nature has faced a raft of legal troubles from Cambodian authorities.
Last month, three environmental campaigners affiliated with the group were sentenced to between 18 and 20 months in prison for organizing a peaceful march to protest against a massive lake in the capital being filled with sand.
The tussle over Cambodia’s environment and resources has long been a contentious issue in the kingdom, with environmentalists threatened, arrested and even killed in the past decade.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS