Seyla Nhean on Khmer Community’s Advocacy Efforts for the Special Election of the Commission of Inquiry for Cambodia, 23 September 2023
My name is Seyla Nhean, and I have been serving as director and organizer of the Khmer community’s grassroots advocacy efforts related to the United Nation’s recent series of reports, statements and actions challenging whether the just completed national elections were free, fair and legitimate.
The main message that I want to share with you is that, emboldened and empowered by the United Nations’ forceful language and actions of the past year, the Khmer community has developed and has started to carry out a series of important advocacy efforts of its own. This includes the Khmer Urgent Action Alert System, modeled on the highly successful Amnesty International community-based letter writing campaign. It provides the individual members of the Khmer community with a new voice, and a new platform, to protest and bring international attention – or as Amnesty International describes it – to “speak truth to power” by challenging the most serious and abusive human rights and rule of law violations of the Hun Sen regime. This includes:
The case of the 27-year sentence imposed on Kem Sokha for daring to offer a political alternative to Hun Sen;
The “Mass Criminal Trials” of over a hundred political opposition leaders, headlined by Thiery Seng, who were sentenced to between five and eight years for treason because of their political activities; and, most recently,
The totally illegal action by Hun Sen to turn over his power to his son Hun Manet, in direct violation of the core guarantees to the Khmer people that Cambodia would follow the democratic political processes. Self-appointment of a family member successor through executive, autocratic fiat is not democracy. It is a sign of autocracy and dictatorship that is such an extreme demonstration of distain for the democratic process that it cannot and will not be accepted by the international community.
These grass-roots advocacy efforts by the Khmer community are notable, particularly when they are linked with the stronger showing by the United Nations of international rejection of Hun Sen’s systematic and long-standing human rights and rule of law abuses that made it impossible to hold free, fair and legitimate elections. They provide a basis for “a new hope” that meaningful and effective change for Cambodia is possible.
Over the next months, we will be answering the core question of “Where do we go from here,” by making our Khmer grass-roots campaign against the arbitrary and illegal attempt by Hun Sen to “self-select” and “coronate” his son Hun Manet as his successor, the focus – the keynote -- of our major community-based advocacy efforts to use the Amnesty International model to challenge Hun Sen’s blatant disregard of human rights and international law standards to make his and his family’s autocratic control permanent, with the his planned passage of power to Hun Manet. Our advocacy efforts on this urgent case and issue will focus on “speaking truth to power” to all the major foreign governments, and to the agencies and officials of the United Nations responsible for monitoring abuses by the government of Cambodia.
We will use every platform and forum available to us to convey this message, and to challenge Hun Sen’s arbitrary and undemocratic decision. For example, we have just received an invitation from the United Nations to take part in, and make an oral statement before, one of their relatively new monitoring agencies that will be conducting a review of Cambodia in April of 2024. The UN Human Rights Council made a similar opportunity available to us for their April/May Universal Periodic Review process official hearing on Cambodia, and for what they call their Interactive Dialogue on Cambodia taking place in October of 2023. These are all public platforms where we can tell our story to the international community and build international pressure on the Hun Sen/Hun Manet government.
And we will encourage every government and every member of the Khmer community to use economic sanctions, including increased tariffs on trade, a consumer boycott, and an embargo on tourism, to build up the pressures on the Hun Sen/Hun Manet government. These techniques worked with the apartheid regime of South Africa in the 1970s, and they will work for Cambodia today. We encourage you to join these efforts in a meaningful way. There are steps we can take to help promote effective change for Cambodia. Let us move together in that direction, taking grass-roots action, and particularly our new Khmer Urgent Action Alert System, the cornerstone for our advocacy work over the coming months.