Advertisement
Cambodia
AsiaSoutheast Asia

Cambodia charges environmentalists with insulting king, plotting against government

  • Three activists were arrested for documenting the draining of waste into Phnom Penh’s Tonle Sap river. A deported campaigner was also charged
  • Use of royal defamation laws in Cambodia is a relatively new phenomenon, with the legislation only enacted in 2018

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
1
Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni. When the lèse-majesté laws were enacted in 2018, they triggered alarm from rights groups who warned they could be wielded to target dissent. Photo: EPA-EFE
Agence France-Presse
A Cambodian court has charged four environmental activists 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 activists – Sun Ratha, Ly Chandaravuth and Yim Leanghy of advocacy group Mother Nature – were arrested on Wednesday for documenting the draining of waste into Phnom Penh’s Tonle Sap river.

Over the weekend they were “charged with conspiracy to plot and for insulting the king”, Plang Sophal, a spokesman for Phnom Penh Municipal Court, said on Monday.

Also charged was Mother Nature’s co-founder, Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, a Spanish environmentalist who was deported from Cambodia in 2015 after he criticised the government’s plans for a controversial dam.

Sophal did not elaborate on why the activists were hit with those particular charges.

While Cambodia has a constitutional monarch, King Norodom Sihamoni, it has long been ruled by its strongman premier Hun Sen, Asia’s longest-serving leader.

Advertisement