The human rights situation in Cambodia has severely deteriorated since the last national election in 2018, Amnesty International\u2019s interim Deputy Regional Director for Research Montse Ferrer said today, ahead of Sunday polls expected to be dominated by the ruling Cambodian People\u2019s Party after the sole viable opposition group was blocked from participating. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAuthorities in Cambodia have spent the past five years picking apart what\u2019s left of the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association. There is a growing crackdown on human rights in Cambodia. Many people feel that they are being forced to participate in this election despite their party of choice not being on the ballot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cUnder Prime Minister Hun Sen\u2019s leadership, authorities have shut down or heaped pressure on independent news outlets; harassed, intimidated, beaten and jailed political opponents in mass trials; and restricted the rights of candidates to form political parties and contest the vote. Opposition party activists have been attacked in the streets with metal batons on multiple occasions, with one political activist stabbed to death in public in 2021 in what many believe<\/a> to have been a targeted attack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHun Sen has led calls for violence, as seen in a video livestreamed from his official Facebook account in January, that resulted in attacks against political opponents, prompting Meta\u2019s Oversight Board to order the removal of the video and recommend the immediate suspension of the prime minister\u2019s official account<\/a> for six months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHuman rights repression has dramatically escalated in the years since the last national elections. Authorities used the Covid-19 pandemic to further stifle human rights, including the right to freedom of expression, with journalists, human rights defenders and government critics targeted for having opposing views. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe attempt to form and register the new opposition Candlelight Party was quickly quashed in what amounted to a politically motivated decision to not allow their registration. Several Candlelight Party members have been arbitrarily detained<\/a> and some have been sentenced to years in prison on trumped up charges. In the lead-up to the elections, new regulations came into force aimed at punishing people that called for boycotting the vote, making a further mockery of the right to freedom of expression. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCambodian authorities must immediately drop all politically motivated and bogus charges against members of the Candlelight Party, former opposition leader of the dissolved Cambodia National Rescue Party Kem Sokha,<\/a> unionist Chhim Sithar<\/a> and her colleagues as well as anyone jailed solely for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association. Authorities must immediately stop using the court system as a tool to suppress peaceful dissent and halt the ongoing crackdown against independent news outlets and journalists.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Background: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This Sunday, Cambodia is holding its seventh general election since a United Nations-administered vote in 1993. The Cambodian People\u2019s Party is widely expected to sweep all seats, as it did in 2018 in a vote widely seen as unfair by election monitors. All of Amnesty International\u2019s work on Cambodia, including research, press releases and other country-specific outputs, can be found on our website here<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Amnesty international is a global human rights movement, independent of any government, political ideology or economic interest. Raising concerns about human rights violations against individual candidates, members or supporters of a political party or advocates of a particular political position does not imply that Amnesty International supports that party or candidate\u2019s platform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u0e40\u0e23\u0e35\u0e22\u0e19\u0e23\u0e39\u0e49\u0e40\u0e1e\u0e34\u0e48\u0e21\u0e40\u0e15\u0e34\u0e21\u0e40\u0e01\u0e35\u0e48\u0e22\u0e27\u0e01\u0e31\u0e1a\u0e41\u0e2d\u0e21\u0e40\u0e19\u0e2a\u0e15\u0e35\u0e49<\/a> The human rights situation in Cambodia has severely deteriorated since the last national election in 2018, Amnesty International\u2019s interim Deputy Regional Director for Research Montse Ferrer said today, ahead of Sunday polls expected to be dominated by the ruling Cambodian People\u2019s Party after the sole viable opposition group was blocked from participating. \u201cAuthorities in Cambodia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-title":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-description":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-image":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-image-id":0,"_yoast_wpseo_twitter-title":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-description":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-image":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-image-id":0,"_hero_title":"","_hero_content":"","_hero_cta_text":"","_hero_cta_link":"","_hero_alignment":"","_hero_background":"","_hero_size":"","_hero_show":"","_hero_type":"","_hero_embed":"","_hero_video_id":0,"_hero_hide_image_caption":true,"_hero_hide_image_copyright":false,"_nav_style":"","_disable_share_icons":false,"_disable_sidebar":false,"_display_author_info":false,"_hide_featured_image":false,"_hide_featured_image_caption":true,"_maximize_post_content":false,"_reduce_content_width":false,"_sidebar_id":0,"_stretch_thumbnail":false,"byline_context":"","byline_entity":"","byline_is_author":false,"disable_related_content":false,"download_id":0,"download_text":"","show_published_date":true,"show_updated_date":true,"term_slider":"","amnesty_index_number":"","recipients":"","recipients_refresh":"","recipients_refreshed":"","amnesty_umbraco_data":"","document_ref":"","amnesty_updated":"","footnotes":""},"category":[1584],"location":[1588,1589],"resourceType":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-2358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","location-southeast-asia","location-world"],"datePosted":"July 21, 2023","mlpRelationships":{"1":3396,"2":2358},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/category?post=2358"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=2358"},{"taxonomy":"resource-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/resourceType?post=2358"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amnesty.or.th\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=2358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u0e1a\u0e23\u0e34\u0e08\u0e32\u0e04\u0e2a\u0e19\u0e31\u0e1a\u0e2a\u0e19\u0e38\u0e19\u0e41\u0e2d\u0e21\u0e40\u0e19\u0e2a\u0e15\u0e35\u0e49<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"