Cambodian opposition party dissolved by SC

PHNOM PENH: Cambodia’s Supreme Court dissolved the country’s main opposition party and banned more than 100 of its politicians for five years on Thursday, in a ruling blasted by a rights groups as the "death" of the nation’s democracy.

The verdict was widely expected from a justice system heavily warped by the influence of long-standing premier Hun Sen, who is accused of ruthlessly targeting rivals in the run-up to 2018 polls.

It nevertheless delivered a crushing blow to what remained of the embattled Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) -- the only party that had a fighting chance to break the authoritarian leader’s 32-year grip on power.

The court "decides to dissolve the CNRP and ban 118 leaders... from politics for five years starting from the date of the verdict," said Judge Dith Munty, himself a member of Hun Sen’s ruling CPP party, in what rights groups blasted as a mockery of judicial independence.

The judge said the CNRP, by boycotting the trial, had effectively confessed to the government-levied accusation of conspiring with the United States and other foreign actors to plot a revolution.

The CNRP and Washington have rejected those charges as bogus, with the main evidence from the government being a publicly available speech from the party’s president discussing US help to build a democracy-movement in Cambodia.

Rights groups said the verdict stripped next year’s election of any credibility. "This is the death of democracy in Cambodia," said Phil Robertson from Human Rights Watch, calling on foreign partners to suspend any assistance for the 2018 poll.

The International Commission of Jurists said Cambodia had crossed a "red line", with the dissolution stripping millions of voters of a chance to freely choose their representatives. The CNRP’s parliament seats and local posts will now be redistributed to other parties after the government amended laws last month to allow the reallocation.

That pushes Cambodia towards being a de facto one party state, with it highly unlikely opposition activists can now mount any significant challenge to the CPP next year. The verdict is the culmination of a methodical strangling of dissent in Cambodia that began after the CNRP nearly unseated Hun Sen in the last national election in 2013, rattling the premier.

The crackdown accelerated dramatically after the party faired well in local elections this July, despite weathering a series of legal attacks against its leadership. Several months later CNRP president Kem Sokha was suddenly thrown into jail and charged with treason over the same accusations of plotting a revolution.

That arrest, and the threat of a 30 year prison sentence, sent more than half of the party’s 55 lawmakers fleeing into exile out of fear. Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected, has a long history of undercutting his rivals through well-timed crackdowns and dubious court cases.