The Cambodian government has banned a British environmental journalist from entering the country, in an apparent retaliation for his reporting on corruption and natural resources.
Gerry Flynn, 33, was barred from re-entering Cambodia at Siem Reap International Airport on January 5, his employer, the environmental news outlet Mongabay, said in a statement yesterday. Flynn, who is also the president of the Overseas Press Club of Cambodia, was returning from a holiday in Thailand.
“Immigration officials at the airport told Flynn that he was permanently banned from Cambodia because there had been an error on a document submitted as part of his last visa extension application,” the statement said. “He was subsequently forced onto a plane and flown to Thailand.”
Immigration officials produced documentation showing that Flynn had been placed on Cambodia’s immigration blacklist as of November 25, and was “permanently banned” from returning to the country. The blacklisting took place three days after the airing of a France24 documentary that was critical of Cambodian carbon offsetting efforts, in which Flynn was interviewed. According to Mongabay, immigration officials claim that Flynn applied for a visa to work as an electrician, failing to disclose that he worked as a journalist.
Flynn has lived and worked in Cambodia since 2019, during which time he has reported extensively on environmental topics for Mongabay and other media outlets. Much of this has focused on the nexus between illegal logging and the political and economic networks of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). As Mongabay wrote in a separate report yesterday, “Flynn’s reporting has repeatedly unmasked the political and business elite profiting from the plundering of Cambodia’s natural resources.”
In a post on the social media network X this morning, Flynn said that the government’s move “does seem to be retaliation for my journalistic work.” He added that on November 25, the same day that he was placed on the immigration blacklist, the Ministry of Environment described the documentary as “fake news.” This came two days after it arrested six environmentalists, including two who had featured as sources in the France24 documentary, for investigating illegal logging in the Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park.
The six were released on November 25, but some “have since joined Cambodia’s ruling party and condemned their former colleagues,” Flynn added, a “tactic we’ve seen many times before in Cambodia.”
The decision not to permit Flynn’s re-entry on decidedly vague grounds reflects the straitened circumstances facing Cambodian press, which has been subject to increasing pressure from the government in line with a political crackdown that has effaced most meaningful sources of political opposition to the now-hegemonic CPP. Even so, much of this pressure has targeted the Khmer-language media and Cambodian reporters, and it is rare for an accredited foreign journalist to be barred from entering a nation that once boasted a flourishing foreign press scene.
In a statement today, 20 regional press freedom and human rights groups condemned Flynn’s denied re-entry to the country as “a blatant attack on journalism” which “serves as yet another example of the Cambodian authorities’ intolerance of critical and investigative journalism.” Shawn Crispin, the senior Southeast Asia representative of the Committee to Project Journalists, said it showed the lengths the government is willing to go to “suppress independent reporting on the country’s environmental issues.”
He added, “The reality is Cambodia’s predators of the press are knocking down environmental reporters as fast as its forests are falling.”