For that reason, the CCHR has encountered constant obstacles and banning in finding a venue and getting a permit from the municipal authorities for this particular meeting due to various forms of social control and pressure. For instance, on Friday 5 June at the very end of that day’s work and the end of the working week, the Municipality of Phnom Penh served the CCHR director with a summons to appear before its officials, police officers and officials from concerned departments on Monday 8 June at 2:30PM. The director of the CCHR was out of the country, and in the morning of Monday the CCHR office submitted, by hand, a letter to the Municipality seeking the postponement of the meeting until he returned later in the week. The Municipality refused to acknowledge receipt of the letter and insisted the meeting be held as shown in the summons.
The CCHR was compelled to comply its officials enlisted the participation of an official from the field Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in the scheduled meeting. A number of officials from other NGOs lent support but were not allowed in and had to wait outside. At the end of the discussions on the holding of the forum, the municipal officials insisted that they would not consider any application for a permit to hold any forum for the residents of the area until the CCHR submitted with that application a receipt for payment of rent for the venue with the amount clearly stated and the signature of the owner of the premises.
However, the CCHR had already met that requirement when, on 25 May, a guest house called Lazy Fish near the lake agreed to rent its premises to the CCHR as the venue for US$250. It booked the premises and made a deposit of US$50. The forum was then planned for 12 June. But hardly a week later, on 1 June, the head and deputy head of the village where the guest house is located threatened the owner, saying: “If you let the CCHR conduct the public forum, your guest house will close after the forum.” Several days later the owner was summoned to their office. After his meeting with the commune officials, he informed the CCHR that he no longer wanted to rent his place for its forum unless the CCHR could secure a permit from the municipal authorities. On the morning of 8 June when the CCHR went to meet with the municipal officials, a police force of about 20 men surrounded the Lazy Fish guesthouse and shut it down on the charge that its business license had expired.
Before it found the Lazy Fish guest house, the CCHR had also been denied the yard of a mosque in the area when officials of these religious places, afraid of falling out of favour with their ‘benefactors’, withdrew their original consent to allow the use of their property. As a result the CCHR had to postpone its forum. Upon this postponement, local officials warned a woman resident who was distributing leaflets announcing the forum of the consequences of her activity. They told her, “Why do you continue to call and incite residents to go to the meeting now that the forum has already been called off? You should quietly contact the company. Beware! You could be sent to prison.”
Such threats and intimidation, and especially the way the authorities shut down Lazy Fish guesthouse after it had rented its premises, have created a climate of fear in the locality. It was then impossible for the CCHR to find anyone who was willing to rent their premises to be used as a venue for the forum. This meaned that the CCHR could not obtain either premises or a receipt for payment of rent to submit with its application for permit to the Municipality of Phnom Penh.
As a result, the residents of Boeung Kak Lake cannot exercise their constitutional right to freedom of assembly and expression, and in a matter of time they, like hundreds of thousands of their fellow Cambodians in a similar situation, will be forcibly evicted from their homes and lands without just compensation.
It has been seen that the willing of those local and municipal authorities totally violates both national and international on behald of a signatory country. The Cambodian Constitutional Law, Article 31, “ The Kingdom of Cambodia shall recognize and respect human rights as stipulated in the
United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human rights, the covenants and conventions related to human rights, women's and children's rights.” In addition to the law, Article 41, “Khmer citizens shall have freedom of expression, press, publication and assembly. No one shall exercise this right to infringe upon the rights of others, to affect the good traditions of the society, to violate public law and order and national security.” Whereas the Univeral Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights also metion the rights of Cambodian citizens to free expression and assembly.
No comments:
Post a Comment