A Cambodian court has denied a request for bail by the award-winning freelance journalist Mech Dara, who faces trial on charges of “incitement” for his social media posts.
The 36-year-old, who has conducted extensive reporting into human trafficking and the country’s epidemic of online scamming operations, was arrested on September 30. He has since been sent to prison in Kandal province outside the capital Phnom Penh to await trial on charges of “incitement to provoke serious social unrest.” The charges stem from a series of social media posts that he made on September 20, 23, 26, 28, and 29. If found guilty, Dara faces up to two years in prison.
In a report published yesterday, Radio Free Asia (RFA) quoted Dara’s defense layer Rim Bora as saying that he received a notice rejecting the bail application on October 18, but that the court’s reasons for denying the bail request were unclear. “If we speak of the conditions of the request for bail, it should be reasonable enough to allow him on bail, according to the criminal code,” he told RFA.
Bora applied for bail earlier this month on the grounds that Dara was suffering a number of physical and mental health problems in prison, including insomnia and anxiety. Since Dara’s arrest, demands for his release have been issued by press freedom groups, human rights organizations, and foreign governments including the United States and Australia.
This reflects the fact that his arrest was both a particularly dire sign of press freedom in Cambodia – Dara has worked for The Cambodia Daily, Phnom Penh Post, and VOD English, all of which have been shut down or otherwise silenced by the authorities – and a likely act of retaliation for his extensive reporting into the country’s gambling and online scamming industry.
Over the past five years, Dara has helped reveal to the world the extent of an industry in which tens of thousands of people (mostly foreigners) have been forced, under threat of violence, to conduct fraud operations targeting people across the globe. In recognition of his coverage of Cambodia’s scam operations, Dara was last year granted the U.S. State Department’s human trafficking Hero award.
The government claims that Dara’s social media posts, including one that featured a photograph appearing to show damage caused by a quarry operation to Ba Phnom, a pagoda and local tourist attraction in Prey Veng province, as “fake news” that was intended to deceive the public. But most observers believe that the arrest has a clear connection with his work on the online scamming industry, which has brought him into direct conflict with powerful people.
Dara has produced a number of reports tying the scam operations to prominent tycoons and high-ranking members of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). One such figure was Ly Yong Phat, a CPP senator and businessman based in Koh Kong, whom Dara’s reporting has linked to scam compounds. Last month, just three weeks before Dara’s arrest, Ly Yong Phat was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for his connections to scam operations and human trafficking.
In this context, the refusal to grant Mech Dara bail can only be interpreted as a means of further punishing him for his reporting – and for daring to pour light in on the activities of the country’s kleptocratic elite.