Police officers block Boeung Kak Lake residents during a
protest appealing for the release of Yorm Bopha, along a street in Phnom
Penh on June 17, 2013.
© 2013 Reuters
Our Report:
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Two Decades of Impunity in Hun Sen’s CambodiaNovember 13, 2012
Yorm Bopha is behind bars because she opposed a
crony deal to evict thousands of people from prime land in Phnom Penh.
Reducing the sentences of people wrongly convicted is simply a ploy to
take the heat off the government and make its conduct appear reasonable.
(New York) – A Cambodian
court’s ruling upholding the conviction of a land rights activist on
trumped-up charges shows the political use of the country’s legal system
to persecute critics of the government, Human Rights Watch said today.
On June 14, 2013, the Court of Appeals in Phnom Penh affirmed a
guilty verdict on charges of aggravated assault against Yorm Bopha,
while reducing her three-year sentence by one year. Bopha was prosecuted
for exercising her right to free expression and called for her
immediate and unconditional release.
“Yorm Bopha is behind bars because she opposed a crony deal to evict thousands of people from prime land in Phnom Penh,” said Brad Adams,
Asia director. “Reducing the sentences of people wrongly convicted is
simply a ploy to take the heat off the government and make its conduct
appear reasonable.”
Yorm Bopha, 29, is one of the leaders of long-term protests against
illegal evictions of residents of the Boeng Kak area of Phnom Penh by a
Chinese company and a local firm closely linked to Cambodian prime
minister Hun Sen. This and other similar protests are a popular response
to land concessions granted by the government to well-connected
domestic and foreign companies, adversely affecting an estimated 700,000
Cambodians. Possession of land is frequently achieved through forced
evictions and evictions without just compensation, carried out with the
help of government security forces and the courts.
Yorm Bopha was originally convicted by the Phnom Penh Municipal Court
in December 2012, for allegedly masterminding a conspiracy involving
her husband and two brothers to assault two young men accused of
stealing wing mirrors from her car. The absence of credible evidence
against her showed that the charges were a politically motivated attempt
to retaliate against her for her activism. She was convicted and
sentenced to three years in prison, while her husband received a
suspended jail term. The brothers were convicted in absentia and sentenced to prison.
On March 19, 2013, with Bopha’s appeal pending, Hun Sen gave a speech
in which he declared her sentence a “simple case of her beating someone
up.” Eight days later, the Supreme Court denied her application for
temporary release while her appeal before the Court of Appeals was under
consideration.
The Court of Appeals convened hearings in her case on June 5 and 14,
with her two purported victims providing the main evidence. Questions
put to the two men by one of the judges, such as regarding their
identification of Bopha’s brothers, elicited testimony that demonstrated
their lack of credibility. The court nonetheless upheld her conviction,
reducing her sentence by one year on the grounds that nothing
implicated Bopha in directly attacking anyone.
The Yorm Bopha case reflects a pattern of prosecutions since 2012, in which appeal court hearings reveal a lack of evidence that civil society activists and human rights defenders have committed any cognizable criminal offense, but the judges fail to exonerate them. In some cases, domestic and international pressure appears to precipitate instructions from authorities to the court to release defendants from prison with their criminal convictions intact, but in Bopha’s instance, her prison sentence remains.
The Yorm Bopha case reflects a pattern of prosecutions since 2012, in which appeal court hearings reveal a lack of evidence that civil society activists and human rights defenders have committed any cognizable criminal offense, but the judges fail to exonerate them. In some cases, domestic and international pressure appears to precipitate instructions from authorities to the court to release defendants from prison with their criminal convictions intact, but in Bopha’s instance, her prison sentence remains.
“Political interference with the courts is pervasive in Cambodia, but
it is particularly prevalent in land dispute cases,” Adams said.
Cultivators attempting to contest allegedly illegal state-linked
corporate land seizures in Sihanoukville and Koh Kong province recently
told Human Rights Watch that leading local officials had explicitly
warned them not to expect justice from the courts, explaining that court
decisions are based on political and economic influence, not evidence
and law.
Human Rights Watch called on Cambodia’s donors to press for Bopha’s release and for the criminal charges to be dropped.
“Donors need to speak out on behalf of activists fighting for human
rights in Cambodia,” Adams said. “If they do, Cambodia’s poor may have a
chance for justice.”
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