Nearly 40 activists held for more than a year on incitement charges will soon face a rotating group trial, the latest turn in a protracted legal saga. They were arrested after organizing protests last year against a decades-old development deal with neighboring countries, known as the CLV-DTA, that the government has since scrapped.
Many have already spent over half the maximum sentence in pre-trial detention at prisons outside Phnom Penh.
Rights groups said the arrests – which initially swept up nearly 100 people, including children – were arbitrary and unlawful, and have urged authorities to drop the charges.
All 37 defendants, some linked to activist networks rooted in the Paris Peace Agreements, will be divided into five groups for trial starting next week. Hearings are scheduled weekly, but the court will not proceed to the next group until a verdict is issued in the previous one, a spokesperson for the Phnom Penh Municipal Court said Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, defense lawyers for 11 of the jailed activists renewed their request for bail after earlier rejections. A ruling from the presiding judge is expected by September 3, one attorney said.
“My clients have been in pretrial detention for one year, two months and three days, which already exceeds half the maximum penalty for the charge,” said lawyer Lor Chunthy, who represents more than a dozen defendants including prominent activist Srun Srorn.
“There is no need to continue detaining them,” he said, adding that some are in poor health and their families have suffered emotionally and financially.
Cambodia’s incitement charge is widely criticized by rights groups, who say it is frequently used to target critics, dissenters, journalists and activists.
Deputy prosecutor Seng Heang opposed the defense lawyers’ bail request, urging the judge to keep the defendants in detention. He claimed they had committed offenses “opposing the government” that “seriously affected social order and national security.”
At the bail hearing, Srun Srorn said his activism last year critical of the CLV-DTA, was “an exercise of freedom of expression as a Cambodian citizen concerned about territorial integrity and national development.”
Several dozen supporters and relatives of the jailed activists gathered outside Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Wednesday morning to call for their release.
Seng Sovathana, executive director of the Cambodian Human Rights Center, criticized the slow court process, saying the prolonged pre-trial detention violates the right to a fair trial.
“The accused are legally entitled to freedom,” he said, noting that under national law, provisional detention for intermediate offenses cannot exceed six months after investigation, and any delay beyond that should trigger automatic release.
