A Cambodian court has sentenced a high-profile unionist and opposition figure to four years in prison on charges of incitement, and permanently stripped him of his rights to vote and stand for election.
Rong Chhun, a senior advisor to the opposition Nation Power Party (NPP), was yesterday found guilty of violating Articles 494 and 495 of the Criminal Code by making public comments about online scamming syndicates and the Cambodia-Vietnam border.
The Associated Press reported that the charge was also connected “with political activity for meeting with villagers displaced by government construction projects, including the new Phnom Penh International Airport.”
In handing down the verdict yesterday at Phnom Penh Municipal Court, Judge Le Sokha stated that Chhun’s comments about border demarcation efforts and online fraud syndicates “harmed foreign investment and tourism and caused public fear,” as the Khmer Times phrased it.
“Based on the hearing, and after thorough examination of the evidence and testimony, Chhun was found guilty as charged,” the judge said. “As an additional punishment, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court ruled to permanently revoke the accused’s citizenship rights to vote and to stand for election.”
The 56-year-old denied the incitement charge, and said that he planned to appeal the hearing. “This is not a law enforcement issue,” Rong Chhun told reporters after the verdict. “It’s about politics.”
The alleged charges against Rong Chhun touch on issues that are highly sensitive for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Over the past five years, industrial-scale online scamming operations have become firmly embedded in Cambodia, which has made the country a byword for organized crime and weighed heavily on tourism arrivals, especially from China. According to a considerable body of evidence, these operations are close to figures in the CPP’s inner circles of power, and benefit from either active or indirect protection from elements of the Cambodian state. (The government has flatly denied any involvement in scamming operations, arguing that the extent of the problem has been exaggerated.)
Likewise, discussions about the Vietnamese border have long been a red line in Cambodian politics, with opposition leaders routinely accusing the CPP, whose predecessor party was installed in power by the Vietnamese army in 1979, of ceding land to a nation many Cambodian nationalists view with suspicion.
Rong Chhun has had a line of run-ins with the Cambodian authorities, both for his labor activism and his political advocacy, much of it relating to the fraught issue of Cambodia’s relationship with Vietnam. In 2020, he was arrested and later sentenced to two years in prison for “incitement to commit a felony or cause social unrest,” after he claimed that the demarcation of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam had stripped several farmers of their land. Along with two other defendants, he was also ordered to pay damages of 400 million riel (about $100,000), for which the Phnom Penh Municipal Court ordered the seizure of his assets, including his home in Phnom Penh, last month.
Chhun is a mainstay of Cambodian civil society whose career exemplifies the close relationship between independent union activity and opposition parties. He is a longtime labor leader with the Cambodian Confederation of Unions and the Cambodian Independent Teachers’ Association. In late 2023, he helped form the NPP as a de facto successor to the Candlelight Party, after the latter was arbitrarily excluded from participating in the national election in July of that year. He previously served as vice president of the Candlelight Party.
Chhun’s conviction is the latest in a long line of prosecution-cum-persecutions that have seen hundreds of opposition political figures arrested, banned from politics, forced into exile, or pressured to defect to the CPP. In December, Sun Chanthy, the former president of the NPP, was convicted of inciting social unrest and sentenced to two years in prison. The charge was connected to criticisms that he posted on social media of the government’s policy on issuing “poverty cards,” which allow poor Cambodians to receive free medical treatment and other welfare benefits. He, too, was stripped of his right to vote or run for office in any future election.
This crackdown has also extended to civil society activists and even ordinary citizens who criticize the government publicly. In recent weeks, Cambodian courts jailed a Cambodian maid who was deported from Malaysia after criticizing former Prime Minister Hun Sen on Facebook, and denied bail to five activists from the Mother Nature environmental group who are currently serving lengthy prison sentences for plotting against the government and insulting the king.
Last year, the Cambodian authorities arrested scores of opposition activists who led a campaign against a long-standing economic agreement with Laos and Vietnam, accusing the government of ceding territory and natural resources to Vietnam. The government later announced its withdrawal from the agreement.