Cambodia has lost over a third of its primary forests in the last two decades, with the government handing out large swaths of the country’s biodiverse landscapes to private development projects. This has sparked outrage from environmental rights organizations across the country.
Now, 10 Cambodian environmental activists have been sentenced to six to eight years in prison on charges of plotting against the government and insulting the king.
Human rights groups have called the charges politically motivated and part of a pattern of government efforts to suppress dissent. Family members and other activists are finding a way forward after the July sentences.
The Cambodian environmental group Mother Nature has spent more than 10 years working to expose the damaging impacts of business projects often linked to political elites.
One of their primary tactics is producing short-form, often humorous videos calling attention to corruption and environmental degradation. The group has almost half a million followers on Facebook, the country’s primary social media platform, and its TikTok videos have amassed hundreds of thousands of views.
The youth-led movements’ campaigns have helped halt the construction of a hydroelectric dam and bring an end to the country’s destructive sand export industry.
Cambodian authorities have pushed back. The government stripped the organization of its NGO status in 2017, and five members were given prison sentences in 2021 after planning a one-woman march. The charges in the most recent trial stem from a range of activist work from the last decade as well as comments purportedly made by members in a Zoom meeting.
In early August, Pat Raksmey sat in the garden behind her mother’s home in Kandal province, her 7-month-old cooing in her lap. She moved here with her two sons after her husband, Mother Nature activist Thun Ratha, was sentenced to six years in prison in July.
Ratha had already spent 14 months behind bars beginning in 2020 on charges related to his activism.
Raksmey said that the two of them had emotionally prepared for his possible return to prison. In anticipation, Ratha told her to be strong and to take care of their children.
“To me, when I heard him saying that, as a wife, I felt so emotional and afraid that he would be losing his rights and freedoms and could not take care of his wife and children,” she said.
She said that she has lost her happiness in her husband’s absence.
“My son asked me, ‘Where is Dad going, Mom?’ I did not tell him the truth because I didn’t want him to feel afraid by telling him that the police had arrested his father,” she said, speaking about her 4-year-old son. “He would have a bad memory in his mind.”
Ultimately, Raksmey thinks the imprisonment of her husband and other activists will motivate more young people to fight for Cambodia’s environment.
“The Mother Nature activists should be global leaders in the environmental movement. They are spectacular, intelligent, creative, dynamic people, the kind of people any country should want to be involved in public affairs,” said Brad Adams, executive director of Climate Rights International. “Instead, they have been put in prisons far away from their families and basically, left to rot for a few years in what are really terrible prisons in Cambodia.”
Adams said the sentencing of these activists is business as usual for the Cambodian government, which has been testing Western and donor responses to their crackdowns for years.
“They push as far as they can until the US and others push back. And the US has basically used some rhetoric but done nothing for many, many years,” he added. “They’re cozying up to authoritarian regimes in the region so that they can build a coalition that might challenge China. But the cost is the human rights of the people of those countries.”
In response to international criticisms, Cambodia’s Justice Ministry spokesperson Chin Malin said the enforcement against the activists is in compliance with the country’s laws.
“They were charged not because of exercising their rights and freedom as environmental activists, but because of criminal acts they have committed and the authority has enough factual and legal ground on that case,” he wrote on the messaging platform Telegram.
A month after the sentencing, fellow Mother Nature activist Mean Lisa stood on a bridge over a river in Kampong Seila district in southwestern Cambodia. Lisa, dressed in a white lab coat and safety glasses, delivered her lines for a social media video about the polluted waterway.
She said that she wants to make sure the voices of her colleagues will not die out while they are in prison. They inspire her to keep going.
“We just want to make them feel proud and make them feel like, all right, I can stay in jail and our activists outside are still fighting for freedom,” she said.
But the safety of their members is an even greater concern now, and Lisa said that she hopes that the international community can help.
“I just want them to make more pressure on our Cambodian government, to reduce some cooperation with our prime minister,” she said. “Because the government is the one who has a duty to protect nature. But it is completely different here in Cambodia.”
After many takes, the team left the bridge and headed to another filming location. Lisa said her goal for this video project is to get at least 100,000 views.
Weeks later, though, the video had not garnered this attention. The group planned to publish it on their social media accounts earlier this month, but the members decided not to, worried about how the government might respond.
Additional reporting and translation by Kong Sreyrath.