Yeang Sothearin and Uon Chhin—who had worked as an editor, reporter and news anchor, and a photographer and videographer for RFA’s Khmer Service, respectively—were taken into custody in November 2017
Local and international rights groups and legal observers have long condemned the treatment of the pair in the courts as part of a wider attack on the media and civil society in Cambodia and called for the country’s trade and aid partners to press for their release
Yeang Sothearin and Uon Chhin—who had worked as an editor, reporter and news anchor, and a photographer and videographer for RFA’s Khmer Service, respectively—were taken into custody in November 2017 and charged with “illegally collecting information for a foreign source” after RFA closed its bureau in the capital in September that year
Independent news organizations in Cambodia are struggling to recover from a major crackdown on the free press during the 2018 election
On November 14, 2017, in the wake of their arrest, the pro-government website Fresh News had indeed leaked information according to which the police had found pornographic material “produced with foreign nationals” on the computer of the one of the two journalists. It is on the basis of this pseudo-information that the judge decided to continue the investigation