Cambodian authorities have arrested an environmental journalist who recently exposed a land grab by a “politically connected” mining company in northern Cambodia, the latest step in a grinding crackdown on independent reporting and environmental activism.
According to an alert from the press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Ouk Mao, 49, was arrested on Friday “by plainclothes military officers without a warrant,” who took him to the provincial military police headquarters in Stung Treng, in the country’s northeast.
Mao’s wife Ek Cheat told the environmental news site Mongabay that the three plainclothes officers who carried out the arrest said that “their boss wanted to speak to Mao about a piece of land.” Mao works for the online outlet Intri Plus News, which covers local news related to governance, corruption, and environmental issues. The outlet currently has 108,000 followers on Facebook.
As RSF details, Mao’s arrest marked “an escalation of a longstanding campaign of judicial persecution against him.” This dates back to mid-2024, when he began exposing the illegal logging operations of Lin Vatey, a mining company with political connections, in Stung Treng province.
In early September, Mongabay reported that Lin Vatey, which it said was “affiliated with powerful Cambodian officials and their families,” had been granted nearly two-thirds of the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest in Stung Treng. Most of the forest had since been enclosed by the company, which “has shuttered an Indigenous-led ecotourism venture in the name of extracting resources both above and below the ground.”
Later in September, Mao was charged with deforestation and incitement, charges that carry up to 10 years in jail. He was not detained, but the investigating judge placed him under judicial supervision, which required him to periodically report his movements to the police. He was due in court on May 20, making it possible that his arrest is connected with these earlier charges, although local military and judicial officials have refused to offer any substantial details.
As Mongabay reports, this did not deter Mao from his work, and he went on to document illegal logging activities in the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, which straddles several provinces in northern Cambodia, including Stung Treng. In March, he was attacked by a group of men, which reportedly included a former police officer, while working in Prey Lang, an assault that was partially captured on video.
He also faces a welter of additional charges related to his journalism. These include charges of defamation and incitement that were brought against him by the Ministry of Environment in February. According to RSF, Mao currently faces 14 charges in total.
Ouk Mao is only the latest to fall victim to the CPP government’s steady narrowing of the permissible space for political activism and dissenting opinion. As I have written previously, Prime Minister Hun Manet’s government, no longer reliant on Western aid money tied to good governance and human rights benchmarks, “has displayed an increasing intolerance for any form of environmental activism that confronts the root-causes of the country’s ecological problems: a political economy marked by political patronage and elite impunity.”
In July, a Cambodian court sentenced 10 members of the environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia to lengthy prison terms, after convicting them of insulting the king and plotting to overthrow the government. This was followed in November by the arrest of the prominent Cambodian environmentalist Ouch Leng and five others while investigating illegal logging in the Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park in the northeast.
Then, in December 2024, the journalist Chhoeung Chheng was shot dead while reporting on illegal deforestation in the Boeung Per wildlife sanctuary in the country’s northwest. The following month, the British investigative journalist Gerald Flynn, a correspondent for Mongabay, was stripped of his visa and permanently banned from returning to the country – an obvious retaliation for his detailed reporting on environmental issues.
Environmental activism and journalism have long been risky occupations in Cambodia. In late 2023, the local human rights group Licadho reported that at least 15 journalists had been killed working in Cambodia since 1994, at least 12 of whom were “reporting on sensitive issues at the time of their deaths.” And at least 10 environmental activists have been killed in Cambodia between 2012 and 2021, the London-based watchdog Global Witness reported in 2022. Few, if any, of the perpetrators of these killings have been brought to justice.