Prime Minister Hun Sen has warned two political analysts over criticizing the government’s foreign policy, one by name and the other by saying there was already a warrant out for his arrest.
Several family members of jailed opposition politicians staged a small rally outside the U.S. Embassy on Friday, aiming to bring attention to the country’s political prisoners.
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.
Fourteen defendants — six of them in absentia — were tried for incitement at the Tbong Khmum Provincial Court in a full-day hearing that saw questions over messages on T-shirts and rallies in Phnom Penh, family members said.
A repeatedly delayed incitement trial for 14 activists in Tbong Khmum province has been scheduled again for next week, with families pleading for movement in the case — but a court spokesman said further potential delays would be up to the discretion of the judge.
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.
Tbong Khmum, the nation’s youngest province, has faced a sharp crackdown against opposition supporters in the last several months, with at least nine activists in jail. But family members of imprisoned CNRP supporters say they will not be silenced.
Wives of two former CNRP councilors say their husbands, who were arrested and sent to court on Thursday following a mass trial hearing of officials and supporters of the outlawed opposition, had made sacrifices for the nation while alluding arrest.
After three years without a viable political opposition, politicians who stand apart or have broken from the outlawed main opposition party say the old vehicle of the CNRP should be left aside to give people with grievances a chance to participate in politics again.
Authorities claiming to be looking for weapons thwarted a small handful of supporters of the banned opposition CNRP from gathering outside the party’s former headquarters in Phnom Penh on Monday, the three-year anniversary of its dissolution.
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