A number of environmental activists in Cambodia have been jailed and fined for insulting the Cambodian king.
In 2021 members of a green group, Mother Nature, documented waste run-off going into the Tonlé Sap river, close to the royal palace in Phnom Penh.
Ten people, including one of the group’s founders, Spaniard Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, were charged with plotting against the government. Three of those charged, including Gonzalez-Davidson, were fined and sentenced to eight years in jail, while the other seven were only fined.
The group was founded in 2013 and has been prominent in documenting pollution and damage to the environment in Cambodia.
Laws against insulting the king are fairly new in Cambodia, and were only promulgated in 2018, in a move which critics say was designed to crack down on dissent. In addition, when the group was arrested in 2021, prosecutors did not say what law had been broken.
In recent years Cambodia has moved sharply to authoritarianism, with flimsy pretexts given for the banning of opposition parties. Long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen stood down last year, and was succeeded by his son, Hun Manet.
Human Rights Watch criticised the verdict and said that it sent an ‘appalling message’.