They rob your land and they put you in jail to silence you: Justice-a-la-Hun Sen Inc.

Boeung Kak resident Nhoem Ray at a protest against eviction in Phnom Penh on Monday. (Photo by: HENG CHIVOAN)

Arrests quash land dissent

Thursday, 30 October 2008
Written by CHRAN CHAMROEUN AND ELENOR AINGE ROY
The Phnom Penh Post

Human rights advocates say the arrests of nine community organisers in the past week is an attempt to silence dissent on the issue of rural land-grabbing

LOCAL rights groups are becoming increasingly concerned over the recent spate of arrests of community organisers, with the leaders of nine land-grabbing resistance groups arrested across the Kingdom in the last week.

"Community representatives continue to be arrested, charged and imprisoned because of their efforts to assist fellow villagers to protect their land," said Kek Galabru, president of the human rights group Licadho.

"Frequently there is no evidence whatsoever for the charges against them - the law is simply misused as a weapon to try to intimidate their communities into giving up land."

The recent arrest cases are unsettling as two of the charges against six of the arrested have been discovered to be unfounded and inaccurate, according to a Licadho investigation.

Six people arrested in Kampong Thom province on October 22 were the representatives of 1,300 families who are facing a land dispute with a Vietnamese company, Tin Bean Co. All six have been released, although only three have been formally charged.

In Svay Rieng province on October 23, two community organisers - Sum Oeung and Tia Khun - representing thirteen families, were arrested and have been charged with damaging private property. They are in detention.

A further four community organisers representing forty families were arrested in Siem Reap province Friday, and have been sent to pre-trial detention. The men in this case were charged with using violence, but according to Licadho's investigation, the accusations are incorrect.

International human rights group Amnesty International and the Asian Human Rights Commission have added their voices to the escalating concerns about the detention of community organisers.

Sam Rainsy Party spokesman Son Chhay said detention is commonly used as a scare tactic to frighten potential protestors.

"Such action is pre-meditative. It is used to scare other provinces from rising up and protesting," he said.

Son Chhay said such acts would continue as long as the justice system remained dependent and always supported those in positions of power and authority.

Justice a tool of the rich: AI

Minority groups from throughout Rattanakkiri join together in Banlung to protest land grabbing and illegal logging of ancestral lands, in this fiile photo taken earlier this year. (Photo: Tracey Shelton)

Tuesday, 30 September 2008
Written by Christopher Shay
The Phnom Penh Post

Two rights groups last week identified a worsening pattern of intimidation against activists in which the justice system is used as a tool of persecution

CHHEA Ny was arrested without warrant, held in isolation and shackled in chains normally used to restrain elephants in a dark Phnom Penh prison cell. His crime? He had confronted local officials in Battambang province over a land rights dispute.

An intensifying pattern of intimidation among local human rights activists, in which the criminal justice system is used as a tool for the rich and powerful to threaten any who oppose them, was identified by two independent briefing papers released last week by local and international rights groups.

The government is failing to protect its citizens from such attacks despite the fact that in frequency and strength, the persecution is getting worse, both reports say.

In an attempt to draw attention to the mounting crisis, local rights group Licadho, in its report "Attacks and Threats Against Human Rights Defenders in Cambodia 2007", highlights some of the worst abuses against rights defenders.

They describe the plight of Khmer Krom monks, and in particular that of Tim Sokhorn, whose efforts to protest an ambiguous citizenship status at home and support of his ethnic counterparts in Vietnam led to his arrest and deportation to Vietnam where he remains under house arrest.

Not quite citizens
Jason Barber, an advocacy consultant at Licadho, told the Post: "Cambodia considers them [Khmer Krom] Cambodian citizens ... but they would certainly dispute they're treated the same as other Cambodian citizens."

Amnesty International's (AI) report "Cambodia: A Risky Business - Defending the Right to Housing" documents a growing trend in which the Kingdom's rich and the powerful are "increasingly using their leverage to silence their adversaries through the criminal justice system".

ARRESTING ONE MAN IS TO THREATEN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE.

Nowhere is this more evident, according to AI, than in the issue of land rights, where some 150,000 Cambodians are currently at risk of forced eviction.

According to research from the local rights group Adhoc, arrests of land activists have almost doubled from 78 in 2006 to 149 in 2007.

"The rapid increase in the number of peaceful land activists in prison is a serious concern in its own right. But every imprisoned human rights defender becomes a tool for intimidation of other activists," Brittis Edman, AI's Cambodia researcher, said in a statement on Friday.

Rights organisations argue that cases like Chhea Ny's harsh imprisonment and Tim Sakhorn's deportation have an impact beyond the individuals and communities immediately involved.

Chhea Ny's wife, Oeun Sarim, told AI: "The case against Chhea Ny was an attack against the minds of people in all 21 provinces who share the same problems, to scare them. Arresting one man is to threaten hundreds of thousands of people, scaring them from struggling and advocating.... I see this as an injustice for the Cambodian people."