Cambodia Jailed 117 People for Speech This Year. The Court That Does It Has a Name.

A coconut seller gets 18 months for a Facebook comment. A tuk-tuk driver gets four years for "demoralizing the army." A defrocked monk gets 18 months for a message in a private Messenger group. None of these people organized an uprising. They typed something Hun Manet's government didn't like, and a court in Phnom Penh did the rest. This is not chaos. It is a system, and it is getting faster.

Human Rights Now counted at least 82 people arrested for speech or activism in Cambodia in 2025. By April 2026 that number had become a running total of 131 people jailed in a single year — a record. As of August it sits at 117. The charge of choice is "incitement to commit a felony" under Articles 494 and 495 of the Criminal Code, a law broad enough to cover a protest banner, a border-conflict photo, or a comment about army morale. Courts apply it with the predictability of a vending machine: arrest, trial, conviction, appeal denied. The Phnom Penh Municipal/Capital Court and the Appeal Court above it have become the processing plant, not a check on power but an extension of it.

The 2023 handover from Hun Sen to his son Hun Manet was supposed to be the opening. Instead the machine sped up. Journalists Phorn Sopheap and Pheap Pheara got 14-year treason sentences upheld by the Supreme Court for posting photos of soldiers near the Thai border — taken, notably, after a ceasefire was already in place. Youth leader Thy Thorn got seven years for "plotting" tied to a 2024 protest, with prosecutors presenting no evidence the trial record showed anyone needed. Thirty-three people were convicted in one sitting in April 2026 for opposing a regional development deal the government itself later scrapped — meaning the state imprisoned people for being right.

This is the model other far-right and authoritarian projects everywhere are refining in parallel: keep the courts, keep the paperwork, keep the appeals process, and use all of it to manufacture the appearance of due process around what is simple political punishment. Cambodia's information minister calls this "safeguarding national security." It is the same sentence every state uses right before it jails the person who photographed what it didn't want photographed. The target list — journalists, land activists, student leaders, factory workers, a Buddhist monk — tells you who actually threatens entrenched power in Cambodia: not foreign enemies, but anyone capable of organizing people who have nothing left to lose.

Solidarity here isn't abstract. Transnational repression means Cambodian critics abroad are still watched, still threatened, still have family back home exposed to retaliation. The same playbook — broad incitement statutes, compliant courts, selective prosecution dressed as rule of law — is being tested and refined in plenty of countries that like to think of themselves as democracies. Cambodia's courtroom is a preview, not an outlier.

Sources

Human Rights Now: Cambodia's accelerating assault on civil and political rights (Aug 2026)
CIVICUS Monitor: Cambodia civic space tracker
LICADHO: Expression/Assembly case library
AP via CONVEN: Supreme Court upholds journalists' treason convictions