Cambodia jails 71-year-old radio broadcaster

PanARMENIAN.Net - A Cambodian court jailed a 71-year-old radio broadcaster and land-rights campaigner for 20 years on Monday, Oct 1 after finding him guilty of leading an anti-state rebellion, a verdict condemned by activists as a further crackdown on human rights, Reuters reported.

Three judges in the Phnom Penh court convicted Sonando, who has joint Cambodian-French citizenship, and 13 others of inciting villagers in eastern Kratie province to rebel against the government.

Sonando, a long-time rights campaigner and critic of Prime Minister Hun Sen, stood accused of inciting villagers to take up arms and of aiming to recruit up to a million people to topple the government, charges his supporters say were trumped up.

Hun Sen urged in a nationally broadcast speech in June that Sonando be arrested for masterminding "a plot to overthrow the government and attempting to establish a state within a state".

Sonando, the head of Beehive Radio, had pleaded not guilty.

The number of land disputes in Cambodia has exploded in recent years as the economy grows rapidly and companies move to exploit natural resources such as rubber, sugar, and minerals.

Human rights groups have accused Hun Sen's authoritarian government of riding roughshod over land rights by granting huge economic land concessions to companies and then evicting land-dwellers by force.

The World Bank froze new lending to Cambodia last year and said it would not resume loans until the government did something to help hundreds of families facing eviction from land around a lake in Phnom Penh.

A spokesperson for the EU High Representative, Catherine Ashton, said in a statement that the conviction "raises severe doubts about the impartiality and independence of the court".