Cambodian Opposition Leader Is Found Guilty of Treason Before Election

Kem Sokha, co-founder of the defunct Cambodia National Rescue Party, was accused of conspiring to overthrow the government and sentenced to 27 years of house arrest. 

Kem Sokha, the co-founder of the now-defunct Cambodia National Rescue Party, leaving his house for the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Friday.Credit...Cindy Liu/Reuters



By Seth Mydans
March 3, 2023Updated 3:56 p.m. ET

Kem Sokha, Cambodia’s most prominent opposition politician who is still in the country, was sentenced to 27 years of house arrest Friday on a charge of treason and barred from running or voting in elections.

Cambodian courts are not an independent branch of government, and the sentence is the latest step that Prime Minister Hun Sen has taken as he crushes what remains of a political opposition in advance of a July election. Mr. Hun Sen, who has been in power for 38 years, has said he is planning to run in that election and has anointed one of his sons, Lt. Gen. Hun Manet, to succeed him in the future.

“It is not right, unfair and can’t be accepted,” said Ang Oudom, one of Mr. Kem Sokha’s lawyers, after the sentence was announced. He said he would appeal but added, “It is a political case, and only politicians can decide.”

Outside the courthouse, where several ambassadors had gathered to hear the verdict, W. Patrick Murphy, the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, said the case was fabricated and a miscarriage of justice.

“Denying Kem Sokha and other political figures their freedom of expression, their freedom of association, undermines Cambodia’s Constitution, international commitment and past progress to develop a pluralist and inclusive society,” he said.

On Friday afternoon, the U.S. Department of State said in a statement that the “multiyear process to silence” Mr. Kem Sokha was “unjust” and that it diminished Cambodia’s international standing. It also cited a “larger pattern of threats, harassment and other unacceptable actions” against political opposition leaders, the news media and civil society.

Mr. Kem Sokha, 69, is a co-founder of the now-dissolved Cambodia National Rescue Party, known as the C.N.R.P., along with Sam Rainsy, who has been in self-imposed exile since 2015 to avoid arrest for defamation, among other charges. Mr. Kem Sokha was arrested in September 2017 in a showy late-night raid on a charge of colluding with the United States government to take power in Cambodia.

That charge was based on a statement he made in a video about receiving advice from American pro-democracy groups. He has denied the charges, and Washington has dismissed them as “fabricated conspiracy theories.”

From abroad, Mr. Rainsy said the charges against Mr. Kem Sokha were “based on a grotesque reading of a standard speech he had made years earlier in Australia.”

Mr. Kem Sokha was moved from prison to house arrest just over a year after he was detained and then freed from house arrest in November 2019 but banned from politics. Soon after his arrest, the Supreme Court dissolved the C.N.R.P. after the government accused it of plotting its overthrow.

The party posed the most serious threat to Mr. Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, known as the C.P.P., and the C.N.R.P.’s dissolution cleared the way for Mr. Hun Sen’s party to sweep all 125 seats in the National Assembly in a 2018 election.

Mr. Kem Sokha’s arrest and the termination of the C.N.R.P. were part of a wide-ranging crackdown on opposition politicians, activists and members of the press that has seen hundreds of people jailed or sentenced in absentia after fleeing abroad. In June, a court in Phnom Penh convicted at least 51 opposition figures of “incitement” and “conspiracy” as well as other charges.

Among those convicted was Theary Seng, a lawyer and civil rights activist with dual American and Cambodian citizenship, who is now serving a six-year sentence in a remote prison in Preah Vihear Province.

Human Rights Watch, which has strongly condemned each step of the crackdown in Cambodia, called on foreign governments Friday to reassess their approach to Mr. Hun Sen’s government.

“It was obvious from the start that the charges against Kem Sokha were nothing but a political ploy by Prime Minister Hun Sen to sideline Cambodia’s major opposition leader and eliminate the country’s democratic system,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

He said the sentence “isn’t just about destroying his political party but about quashing any hope that there can be a genuine election in July.” Ming Yu Hah, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director over Southeast Asia, emphasized the same point, saying, “This verdict is an unmistakable warning to opposition groups months before national elections.”

Mr. Hun Sen put the point in graphic terms in a speech in January, in which he warned his political opponents to prepare for assault. He said he could “gather people belonging to the C.P.P. to protest and beat you,” and added, “Be careful. If I can’t control my temper, you will be destroyed.”

Sun Narin contributed reporting from Phnom Penh.

Seth Mydans reported as a foreign and national correspondent for The New York Times and its sister publication, The International Herald Tribune, from 1983 to 2012. He continues to contribute to The Times.