CCHR FoEx/HRD Alert - Phnom Penh authorities attempt to crack down on Boeung Kak community march

CCHR Freedom of Expression/Human Rights Defenders Alert – Phnom Penh, 4 September 2013

Phnom Penh authorities attempt to crack down on Boeung Kak community march

The Phnom Penh authorities today restricted a peaceful march by Boeung Kak community representatives and supporters to mark one-year imprisonment of fellow land rights activist Yorm Bopha, who was wrongfully convicted in December 2012. The community planned to march from their area of Phnom Penh to the Wat Phnom pagoda and then to the Supreme Court to demand that the court urgently hear Yorm Bopha’s case. When they notified City Hall that they planned to hold the march, City Hall responded to the community and said that if they were planning on having more than 200 participants, they could only carry out their activities within the Boeung Kak area.  

Despite the lack of permission from City Hall, the community decided to proceed, believing that there were no legal grounds to prevent them from peacefully demonstrating. When they attempted to leave from Boeung Kak this morning to march towards Wat Phnom, several groups of community members wearing t-shirts and carrying flowers, flags, loudspeakers and other campaigns material, were prevented from exiting by the police. The community representatives asked the monitoring team from the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (“CCHR”) to load their van with the campaigns material – t-shirts, flags, loudspeakers etc. so that they would be allowed to leave. The CCHR team did as the community asked and drove towards the exit. The police and military police had barricaded the road and stopped the CCHR van. Behind the van were two tuk tuks carrying supporters with flags and banners etc. The police and other security forces confiscated these materials aggressively, even hitting one man on the head.

The police would not allow the CCHR team to leave and insisted on searching CCHR’s vehicle. The CCHR team asked the police what grounds they had to search the van to which the police responded that the community activities were not supposed to leave the Boeung Kak area and that the CCHR team was therefore not permitted to transport campaigns material on the community’s behalf. The police then wanted to accompany the vehicle to the police station. Currently the team is still on site at Boeung Kak, discussing the situation with the police. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Union have since arrived on the scene.

For more information please contact CCHR’s Human Rights Defenders Project Coordinator Chhay Chhunly via email at chhunly.chhay@cchrcambodia.org or via telephone at +855 (0) 17 52 80 21.

Please kindly find attached the alert in PDF format in English.  The Khmer version will follow shortly.

Kind regards,

CCHR