Former CNRP Commune Chief Arrested for 2019 Incitement
A former opposition commune chief in Kampong Speu province was arrested and jailed on Thursday for a crime of incitement dating back to January 2019, the provincial governor said.
A former opposition commune chief in Kampong Speu province was arrested and jailed on Thursday for a crime of incitement dating back to January 2019, the provincial governor said.
Touch Vibol, executive director of the Student Movement for Democracy (SMD), said in a statement this week that critics had been twisting the group’s words using abusive language, curses and insults.
Less than a year to elections, the country’s former main opposition party says it has no plan it can share with the public about rebuilding a political presence in the country.
Former CNRP lawyer and board member Choung Choungy has applied for political rehabilitation — after being banned by the Supreme Court in 2017 — but an Interior Ministry spokesperson said his reentry into politics could be hampered by an unresolved court case.
A journalist working for Siem Reap Breaking News and arrested on Wednesday was charged with incitement and violations of the Covid-19 Law, the latter punishable by up to three years in prison.
Dissident Kung Raiya said he preferred to focus on business and family instead of speaking out and facing risk, a compromise faced by many opposition members after the CNRP’s dissolution.
Though a killer was tried and sentenced to life in prison in 2017, Bou Rachana, wife of slain political analyst Kem Ley, says she is still in pain, raising their children alone in Australia, and has no faith in receiving true justice.
Political analyst Kem Ley’s murder of July 10, 2016, ignited one of the last outpourings of mass civic and political expression seen in an increasingly repressed nation. Recollections from Phnom Penh residents, Ley’s colleagues and others are pieced together in this account of the historic day and the weeks that followed.
Fourteen defendants — at least 12 of them linked to the banned CNRP — were convicted by a Tbong Khmum court on Friday for alleged incitement, with their families saying the $500 to $1,000 fines imposed are too big a cost for their indebted households.
With under a year until next year’s local-level elections, political analyst Em Sovannara predicts that the country’s opposition parties might be able to win a total of five to 10 communes out of more than 1,600.
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