- A journalist who covered the land grab and deforestation of a community forest by a mining company has himself been charged with deforestation.
- Ouk Mao was instrumental in bringing to light the takeover of the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest in Stung Treng province by the politically connected company Lin Vatey.
- In mid-September he was charged with deforestation and incitement, for which he faces up to 10 years in jail; while not detained, he’s subject to court-ordered monitoring and cannot leave his village without permission.
- Activists say Cambodia’s courts have been weaponized against critics, with a pattern emerging where “protectors of Cambodia’s remaining forests are accused of perpetrating the very crime they are standing against.”
STUNG TRENG, Cambodia — It was late in the afternoon of Sept. 16 when Ouk Mao finally answered his phone. The environmental journalist had spent much of that Monday making preparations in case he was jailed the next day.
Mao was accused of illegal logging in the northeastern province of Stung Treng. Mao is known in his community for having played a key role in exposing a land grab perpetrated by mining company Lin Vatey, which has ties to senior figures within the Cambodian military.
His reporting on Lin Vatey’s logging and mining operations had earned him the ire of local authorities, so he wasn’t overly surprised when, on Aug. 20, he was summoned for questioning at the Stung Treng Provincial Court. But he was surprised by the charges: illegally clearing state-owned forest and incitement. These are crimes that carry jail sentences of 10 and two years respectively, as well as fines totaling tens of thousands of dollars. The questioning was set for Sept. 17, leaving Mao convinced he would be jailed.
“It is just a pretext to arrest me,” Mao told Mongabay. “They are angry at me because I covered the news in the community forest of Phnom Chum Rok Sat that affects the high-ranking officials, so the court accused me of clearing forest because I have talked a lot about deforestation.”
While Mao wasn’t jailed after questioning as he’d feared, the investigating judge did place him under judicial supervision, meaning Mao will be surveilled by authorities and will have to report his movements to them periodically for an indefinite period of time. This, Mao said, is a punishment for having spoken out against Lin Vatey’s land grab in the community forest.
A Mongabay report, published Sept. 5, detailed how Lin Vatey’s political connections had been leveraged to grab nearly two-thirds of the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest in Stung Treng province. Most of the forest is now sectioned off by the mining company, which has shuttered an Indigenous-led ecotourism venture in the name of extracting resources both above and below the ground.
Ever since the company moved into the community forest, ushering in rampant deforestation, it was Mao who covered the issue for the local online outlet he works for. As a result of his reporting on Lin Vatey’s activities, he’s received threats, been evicted from his home, and been labeled “a social polluter” by local authorities who repeatedly told him he would be arrested if he persisted. As far as Mao is aware, he hasn’t received any threats directly from Lin Vatey or its directors, but has been plagued with anonymous phone calls since he began to expose the company’s role in the destruction of the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest.
The case of Phnom Chum Rok Sat has already seen Moeung Ratha, the community forest’s elected leader, jailed on charges that the community dismissed as spurious. He’s currently being held in pretrial detention, one of the estimated 11,000 prison inmates who haven’t yet had their day in court but nonetheless remain behind bars.
Before he was arrested, Ratha had led members of the community in May 2024 to seize timber logged by Lin Vatey in a bid to resist the mining company’s destruction of the forest that provided for the community. It was Ratha who reached out to Mao about Lin Vatey in the hope that media coverage might reverse the company’s land grab, but so far authorities have only acted against those seeking to sound the alarm.
Since Ratha’s arrest, other members of the community have fled, some even leaving Stung Treng province, and the company’s plans to convert the forest into an industrial marble mine now move forward largely unopposed. But Mao has remained defiant in the face of mounting pressure.
“I am committed to speaking the truth and I am not fearful of prison because I am not defending the forest for myself or my family — I am defending the forest for the people across the nation,” he said in a phone interview. “If the court finds me guilty, that is their power, but normally when I speak the truth, it affects the rice pots [interests] of the rich.”
No evidence, no trial and no justice
At around 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 17, Mao attended the provincial court in the town of Stung Treng. Two legal advisers, including one from local human rights NGO Adhoc, working pro bono, accompanied Mao.
Instead, it was just Mao, the judge, the prosecutor and the court clerk. By Mao’s recollection, the clerk was asking the questions, mostly related to his activities in the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest and his role as a journalist.
“The clerk asked me what I saw when I visited Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest so I told them I saw excavators clearing the community forest and that as a journalist, it’s my job to report on that,” he said in a second phone interview on Sept. 18. “They accused me and the community leader of clearing the forested land. I said that’s not true, my only job is to report.”
No evidence was presented, no official documents issued, and no trial was held, but the judge nonetheless decided to place Mao under indefinite court surveillance. If he leaves the village where he now lives, he must inform the court. No date was given for a court hearing, and Mao was left with no recourse to challenge the judge’s decision.
Im Phana, one of the Adhoc lawyers, confirmed there was no proof presented to suggest Mao had been involved in clearing forest or that his reporting on Phnom Chum Rok Sat constituted incitement.
“It is the discretion of the investigating judge,” Phana said. “This measure means the judge allows Mao to leave on bail. In the criminal procedure, there are two measures that they judge can implement: send the accused to a detention center, or return home with administrative restrictions in place.”
The judicial surveillance and restrictions on movement can be legally applied to Mao as a defendant even in the absence of any evidence or trial, Phana said.
“If the judge wanted to detain him, they could do on that day, but the judge decided not to and put him under judicial surveillance,” he added, noting that the restrictions and surveillance would remain in effect until the judge completes their investigation.
Phana didn’t have a date or an estimate for how long this process would take, but noted that it was representatives from the provincial department of environment and forestry, and not Lin Vatey, who had filed the complaint with the court.
“He is only a journalist who received information from the community,” Phana said of Mao. “As a journalist, he has the right to cover the news.”
When reached for comment, Stung Treng provincial administration spokesperson Men Kong said he was unaware of the case and declined to answer questions.
Chhum Seang Hak, a spokesperson for the provincial court, dismissed the idea that Mao was placed under surveillance without evidence.
“If there is no evidence, the court would not have pressed charges [against] him,” Hak said.
Hak was unable to detail what evidence, if any, the court has. He reiterated that Mao would be in violation of the judicial surveillance if he left the court’s jurisdiction and that the surveillance would continue as long as it takes for the investigating judge to reach a verdict.
“He is [accused of being] involved in forest land clearance and he is under surveillance by the court,” Hak added. “The charges pressed on him are at the judge’s discretion, so I cannot answer [questions].”
Shooting the messengers
Mao’s ongoing legal harassment isn’t a one-off, but rather the latest in a long-running series of crackdowns on the free press in Cambodia. Exposing environmental crimes, and those who profit from them, has long carried a deadly risk in the country.
In 2012, the body of journalist Hang Serei Oudom was found in the trunk of his car, with authorities determining that he was killed with an ax while investigating illegal logging networks in Ratanakiri province. Following the illegal timber trails in Kratie province resulted in another Cambodian journalist, Taing Try, being killed by a bullet to the head; key suspects included local military personnel. Similarly, military police were involved in the murder of Chut Wutty, arguably Cambodia’s most prominent and effective forest activist, who was gunned down while investigating illegal logging in the Cardamom Mountains.
Between 1994 and 2023, at least 15 journalists have been killed working in Cambodia, with at least 12 of them working on sensitive issues at the time of their death. According to rights group LICADHO, no perpetrators have been brought to justice in any of these cases.
But recent years have seen fewer physical attacks on journalists. Instead, authorities have found increasingly creative ways to silence critical reporters in Cambodia.
Over the course of 2023, journalism monitoring group Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association (CamboJA) documented 32 cases of harassment affecting 59 journalists, with monitoring reports showing a further 16 cases over the first half of 2024. This is on top of the government shuttering independent outlets such as online broadcaster VOD, bilingual newspaper The Cambodia Daily and coercing the sale of the Phnom Penh Post — all of which have been silenced between 2017 and 2023.
This has left many Cambodian reporters with little institutional support and coincided with a rise in reporters operating alone and online, leaving them more vulnerable to legal threats or attacks.
‘A pattern is emerging’
Over the course of 2022 and 2023, Mongabay investigated a massive illegal logging operation in what is now Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park in Stung Treng province. We uncovered that the ultimate beneficial owner of the operation was Meuk Saphannareth, deputy director of Cambodia’s prisons department and a three-star military general.
Despite reporting evidence of illegal logging well beyond the concession that Saphannareth’s company, TSMW, was legally allowed to clear, the operation continues to this day, attracting more attention from local reporters.
Kim Den was one such journalist working for a local online publication in Stung Treng province who covered the TSMW logging operation, only to find himself jailed for five years after being convicted of clearing state-owned forest in December 2023.
Mirroring Den’s conviction was the government’s case against Indigenous rights activist Chhorn Phalla, who was among five activists charged with instigating damage against state-owned forests, despite having a storied track record of defending the forests of Ratanakiri province.
Phalla was sentenced to six years in prison in July 2022, but had been imprisoned since his arrest in 2021. The appeals court eventually dropped charges against all five activists in October 2023, only for them to be convicted again on dubious charges in February 2024. Phalla lost his appeal in June 2024 and is set to spend a year in prison, largely on account of his environmental activism.
Chin Malin, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice, did not respond to questions sent by Mongabay regarding these cases or the common thread that links them.
But Naly Pilorge, outreach director of LICADHO, said Cambodia’s courts have long been weaponized to silence critics.
“In the context of land conflicts, Cambodians facing land loss at the hands of well-connected individuals and companies are often accused of trespassing onto their own property as a means to secure their legal claims,” Pilorge told Mongabay. “Similarly, a pattern is emerging whereas protectors of Cambodia’s remaining forests are accused of perpetrating the very crime they are standing against. These activists are often the only effective measure against environmental destruction, they must be protected, not prosecuted and often imprisoned without any credible evidence.”
Banner image: Ouk Mao showed reporters timber cut from the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest by loggers working for Lin Vatey. Image by Nehru Pry / Mongabay
Correction: An earlier version of this report suggested that Mao faces up to five years for clearing state forest. However, under articles 56 and 62 of the Law on Natural Protected Areas, he could face between five and 10 years in prison if convicted. The story has been adjusted to reflect this.
Mining company tied to Cambodian military officials grabs community forest
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