Mock elections across all provinces will be held on June 20 to trial a new vote-tallying system involving technology funded by Japan, the E.U. and China, ahead of upcoming 2022 commune elections that are scheduled for next June.
Seven women handing a petition to the U.N. human rights office for the release of their jailed activist family members say they were surrounded by 30 to 40 officers, shoved into a flower bed, and told their small gathering required prior permission.
A senior U.S. diplomat asked the Cambodian government to release political prisoners and restore democratic norms ahead of the 2022 and 2023 elections, she said during a conference call Wednesday.
A former vice president of the outlawed opposition CNRP has broken with the strident wing of the party in asking the government to be reinstated to politics this week, a course of action that a party co-founder has previously criticized as effective betrayal.
Prime Minister Hun Sen is setting the stage for heightened repression with his message over the weekend that there are opposition plans “to sabotage the upcoming elections,” civil society groups say.
Former CNRP officials and their families say they are worried that assaults against them will continue, “again and again,” and remain unsolved by police, following last month’s attack against a 15-year-old — whose mother says she was “neglectful” for not making him wear a helmet outside.
Foreign embassies and rights advocates have decried the sentencing of three members of an environmentalist group to more than a year in prison over their activism, with some, including the group’s founder, saying they should be released and their calls for environmental protection supported rather than criminalized.
The 15-year-old son of a former opposition official was struck in the head with a brick by unidentified attackers this week while picking up his mother, a “Friday Women of Cambodia” protester, from buying food, she said.
Exiled opposition politician Sam Rainsy urged Cambodians to receive the currently available Chinese vaccines to protect themselves from Covid-19, though Prime Minister Hun Sen doubted Rainsy’s sincerity amid a global vaccine shortage.
Three youth activists for environmental group Mother Nature stood firm in the closing of their incitement trial on Thursday as the presiding judge pressed them that the group’s Facebook page was illegal, the government filling in lakes would improve traffic, and the activists’ research was insufficient.
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