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| Opposition leader Sam Rainsy and two assistants were each sentenced to five years in jail yesterday over a Facebook post concerning a section of a 1979 Cambodia-Vietnam border treaty the government deemed fake. |
Opposition leader Sam Rainsy and two assistants were each sentenced to five years in jail yesterday over a Facebook post concerning a section of a 1979 Cambodia-Vietnam border treaty the government deemed fake.
The trio was convicted of conspiracy to forge public documents, the use of fake public documents and incitement to cause chaos after the document was posted to Mr. Rainsy’s Facebook page and purportedly showed that both countries had agreed to dissolve their borders in a signed treaty.
Phnom Penh Municipal Court investigating judge Leang Samnat announced his verdict in the absence of both the plaintiff and defense counsel, as well as in the absence of the three accused, who were charged under articles 107, 108, 429, 430 495 and 29 of the Criminal Code.
However judge Samnat said Mr. Rainsy’s two assistants, who ran the CNRP president’s Facebook page, Ueng Chong Leang and Sombath Satya, need only serve three years of their five- year sentences.
Both have fled the country, news wire AFP reported.
“I order the arrest of the accused Ueng Chong Leang, also known as Mab, Sombath Satya and Sam Rainsy to implement the punishment by the verdict,” judge Samnat said yesterday.
The judge added that he had decided to convict the three men following the conviction of former opposition senator Hong Sok Hour, who last month was sentenced to seven years behind bars on similar charges, over posting the same document.
Mr. Sok Hour was detained in August 2015, two days after Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered his arrest, claiming he was distorting facts and jeopardizing the country’s interests.
Mr. Rainsy, who is living in exile in France, reiterated on Facebook yesterday that the document in question, which he claims was incorrectly translated from Khmer to English, had been circulating online prior to it being uploaded to his Facebook page.
“The document with the wrong translation, it is not Mr. Hong Sok Hour who edited it but this document had been uploaded to the internet many years ago,” he said on Facebook.
“When Hong Sok Hour posted the document – and then deleted it a few hours later – on 11 August 2015, I was traveling in the US and came back to Cambodia only five days later without having been involved in the incident.”
Young Analysts Group president Hang Vitou said yesterday that the case was political in nature and a strategy by the CPP to put pressure on the opposition ahead of next year’s commune elections.
Ruling CPP spokesperson Sok Eysan said Mr. Rainsy’s calls of judicial bias were a means for him to skirt his responsibility for his crime.
From KI Media - Khmer Intelligence
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