(New York) –
Cambodia’s
electoral process is marred by systematic problems that prevent
national elections scheduled for July 28, 2013, from being free and
fair, Human Rights Watch said today. Eight parties are taking part in
the elections, including the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of
Prime Minister Hun Sen, and the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP),
led by the opposition leader Sam Rainsy.
Problems with the electoral process include: unequal media access for
opposition parties; pro-CPP bias within the national and local
electoral apparatus; the lack of an independent and impartial dispute
resolution mechanism; alleged manipulation of voter rolls to allow
“ghost” voters and exclude opposition voters; and campaigning by senior
security forces officers for the CPP.
“The entire process is biased in favor of the ruling party and against the opposition,” said
Brad Adams,
Asia director. “What should result in the will of the people has been
organized to result in the will of the Cambodian People’s Party.”
The National Election Committee (NEC) has refused to reinstate Sam
Rainsy as a candidate after his July 12 royal pardon from trumped-up
criminal convictions. Sam Rainsy returned to Cambodia on July 19, after
four years abroad while facing imprisonment. The committee had endorsed
Sam Rainsy’s removal from the voter rolls and barred him from running
for election because of his convictions.
“An election with the leader of the opposition banned on spurious
grounds is almost the definition of an unfair and undemocratic process,”
Adams said.
The CPP and its direct predecessors have dominated Cambodian politics
since the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, despite losing United
Nations-administered elections in 1993. Independent domestic and
international election observers concluded that the 1998, 2003, and 2008
elections lacked credibility.
The European Union (EU), which had sent official election observation
teams for previous Cambodian elections, told Human Rights Watch that it
would not send an observation team in 2013 because of the many
structural problems that make the elections unfair, and because of the
failure of the CPP-controlled National Election Committee to act on
previous recommendations from the EU and others to ensure free and fair
elections.
“Citizens of genuine democracies would never accept at home the kind
of grip the CPP has on the media and electoral machinery,” Adams said.
“The process has been manipulated to ensure victory for the ruling
party. Cambodia’s donors, including the
United States, European Union, and
Japan, still have enormous clout and should make it clear that they do not consider the process credible.”
One important improvement over previous election cycles has been the
substantial reduction in election related violence – albeit against a
backdrop of massive violence in previous elections for which no one has
been held to account. However, opposition parties have operated in an
environment of threats, harassment, and intimidation. This has severely
impaired the ability of opposition parties to organize, recruit party
members and candidates, and reach voters. The CPP has used politically
motivated criminal charges as a tactic against its political foes,
including through the conviction of Sam Rainsy and threats of charges
against the CNRP’s vice president, Kem Sokha.
Throughout, Hun Sen has made it clear that he would not leave office
even if defeated. CPP leaders and surrogates have warned that an
opposition victory would plunge the country into a civil war or even
lead to a military coup.
“Observers and diplomats judging the fairness of these elections
should not fall into the trap of using lower standards for Cambodia,”
Adams said. “Sadly, Cambodia is still not a democracy, or even on the
path to democracy.”
Cambodian people support CNRP. Photo: Quoc Viet/RFA
For details about the barriers to a free and fair election in Cambodia, please see below.
Barriers to Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia in 2013
Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Cambodia is a party, states:
Every citizen shall have the right and the
opportunity… (a) To take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly
or through freely chosen representatives; (b) To vote and to be elected
at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal
suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free
expression of the will of the electors; (c) To have access, on general
terms of equality, to public service in his country.
However, actions by the Cambodian authorities in the period leading
up to the July 28 elections have violated these rights in the following
ways:
Unequal Access to Media
Equal access to media is essential for free and fair elections. In
violation of Cambodia’s election campaign rules, the eight political
parties competing in the election for the National Assembly have not had
equal access to radio and television, by far the most important sources
of news and information for most Cambodians. The CPP has a near
monopoly on broadcast media, giving it a hugely unfair advantage over
other parties and limiting access to information for voters, most of
whom rely on television and radio for news and information. State-owned
TVK and private stations broadcast pro-CPP news and propaganda while
either criticizing or ignoring opposition parties.
A recent example of bias was the failure of state television and
radio and private television stations to report on the return of Sam
Rainsy to Cambodia on July 19, after receiving a royal pardon. Officials
at TVK admitted publicly that they had decided not to cover Sam
Rainsy’s return and show the large crowds welcoming him back at the
airport and along Phnom Penh roads. Yin Sovey, chief of information at
TV3, said that the director of his station had banned coverage. “Our
broadcast is under the management of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government
and we don’t want to have problems,” Yin Sovey said.
Private stations sent reporters to cover Sam Rainsy’s return, but did
not broadcast stories. Bayon TV, run by Hun Sen’s daughter, said that
it sent reporters but did not air its report to avoid embarrassing
police officials because of the massive “anarchy” in the streets created
by traffic and onlookers. “People will criticize the traffic police
when they see that the road is blocked because of the return of Sam
Rainsy,” a station official said.
Large-circulation print newspapers including
Rasmei Kampuchea,
Kampuchea Thmey and
Koh Sonthepheap did not publish stories on Sam Rainsy’s return either. However,
Kampuchea Thmey,
also run by Hun Sen’s daughter, published a front page story on a much
smaller CPP rally on the same day. The English language
Phnom Penh Post
ran a story on the failure to report on Sam Rainsy’s return with the
headline, “All the News That’s Safe to Print,” suggesting that editors
and reporters could suffer repercussions if they covered Sam Rainsy’s
return.
Self censorship is a significant problem for journalists seeking to
cover the election. Journalists are aware of what happened to Mom
Sonando, the owner of Beehive Radio, one of only two remaining
independent radio stations in Cambodia – there are no independent
television stations. Mom Sonando was arrested in 2003, 2005, and 2012 on
politically motivated charges in retaliation for broadcasting phone-in
programs critical of the government and CPP, and selling blocks of air
time to US-funded Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. In 2012, he was
convicted and imprisoned for 20 years on sham charges of participating
in an armed rebellion. Under international pressure he was released in
March 2013, after a CPP-controlled appeals court resentenced him to a
five year suspended sentence.
Politically Biased National Election Committee
The National Election Committee has lacked credibility because of
political bias since its creation in advance of the 1998 national
election. The five members are nominated by the Interior Ministry, then
approved by the Council of Ministers, chaired by Hun Sen, and finally by
the CPP-controlled National Assembly. Im Suosdey has been the chairman
since 2002. Before that he was the first secretary general of the NEC
from 1998 to 2002. From 1980 to 1995, he was the deputy chairman of the
Central Committee of Youth Association of Cambodia, a CPP-affiliated
entity. He is the brother of Im Sethy, a CPP Central Committee member
and current education minister.
Cambodian people support to change NEC. Photo: Quoc Viet/RFA
The CPP also dominates provincial, commune, and polling place election management committees.
In July 2012, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human
rights in Cambodia stressed the need for urgent reforms “to give
Cambodians confidence in the electoral process.” He said that the root
of the problem was that the National Election Committee is “dominated by
supporters of the ruling party,” and recalled past problems in “its
operation of the voter registration system.”
Domestic and international election observation bodies and donors,
including the United States and European Union, have long called for
reform of the committee and its membership, but the government has
ignored these calls.
Lack of an Independent and Impartial Dispute Resolution Mechanism
Independent election observers in Cambodia and abroad have long called
for the creation of an independent and impartial election dispute
resolution mechanism. In the three elections over which it has presided,
the NEC has rejected opposition complaints and sided with the CPP,
often without any indication that it undertook a serious investigation
into allegations of election irregularities.
Surya Subedi, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights
in Cambodia, reviewed the mechanism to resolve electoral disputes and
concluded that it should be improved.
According to Subedi,
“Currently, the election officials themselves are entrusted with the
task of resolving preliminary election disputes. To increase the
confidence of all political parties in the election process, there is a
need to amend the law and to create another institution, such as a
special election tribunal or election court within the judicial
structure of Cambodia or as a special election tribunal within the
National Constitutional Council to resolve election-related disputes,
rather than using the National Election Committee itself to do so.”
However, the Cambodian government, National Assembly, and NEC have
taken no steps to act on these or other recommendations for reform. If
there are serious disputes after the upcoming election, opposition
parties and members of the public are likely to lack confidence in the
process, and contest the results.
Alleged Manipulation of Voter Lists
In his July 2012 report, Subedi called for measures to prevent fraud in
elections. He said that, “The commune council elections in June 2012
identified continuing problems with voter identity documents, especially
the issuance and use of fraudulent documents (the now-abolished form
1018). The National Election Committee should review the process of
issuing such documents to ensure that the system is not abused by
political parties in their favor and that there are no electoral
malpractices.”
However, serious concerns about fraud have recently surfaced. On July 23, the
Phnom Penh Post published a lengthy story
documenting large variations between official population figures and the number of registered voters in most of Cambodia’s 1,633 communes.
Nearly all of Phnom Penh’s communes have voter registration rates in
excess of 100 percent, amounting to more than 145,000 additional names,
with one commune topping the 200 percent mark, an analysis of previously
unseen government population data reveals.
Further analysis of the already public National Election Committee
voter list shows there are more than 25,000 exactly duplicated names in
Phnom Penh alone, despite previous NEC assurances that exact duplicates
had been removed. According to additional analyses of National Election
Committee data obtained by Human Rights Watch, there are 8,850 exactly
duplicated names within Kandal province, 18,204 in Kampong Cham
province, 6,295 in Prey Veng province, and 13,507 in Battambang
province. In all these instances, spellings of names, dates of birth,
and genders are identical.
Human Rights Watch has also obtained data on what appears to be
massive over- and under-registration in the provinces. The new data
compares voter roll statistics, made public by the National Election
Committee, with leaked official Interior Ministry population figures for
the same communes. The results highlight that among 1,610 communes for
which a comparison is easily possible, registration is 108 percent or
more than the eligible population in 654 communes, according to Interior
Ministry records.
Inquiries in a selection of these locations suggests that
over-registration is achieved by retaining names of deceased citizens
and citizens who have voluntarily moved or been moved by forced eviction
to other places, and by duplicating or fabricating citizens’ names.
Over-registration effectively creates a bank of voter names that can be
abused by simple ballot box stuffing or organizing people fraudulently
to vote in those names. The comparison also shows significant
under-registration of voters who say they had registered but are no
longer on the voter lists. Under-registration can be used to prevent
people who are likely to vote for opposition parties from voting.
Reports by local and international election monitoring organizations
in 2013 drew attention to the nature of these problems. A March audit of
voter lists conducted by the US-funded National Democratic Institute
(NDI) and two Cambodian organizations, the Neutral and Impartial
Committee for Free Elections in Cambodia (NICFEC) and the Centre for
Advanced Study (CAS), concluded that contrary to National Election
Committee figures, which stated that it had registered 101.7 percent of
previously known eligible voters, only 82.9 percent were in fact
registered, while the names of 10.8 percent of voters who believed
themselves to be registered were not found on the registration lists.
Moreover, in the audit, only 63.6 percent of the names on the list could
be verified to exist in person.
In April, the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia
(COMFREL) released a study that concluded that 13.5 percent of those who
said they were registered to vote were not on the voter lists for 2013.
If this figure is accurate for the entire country, it means that 1.25
million previously registered voters will lose their right to vote on
July 28. The report said the missing people’s names were either not on
the lists or so garbled as to be unrecognizable.
In response, on July 11, the National Election Committee released an
audit by a firm it contracted to assess its voter rolls, stating that
field tests concluded that 9.7 percent of people who believed themselves
registered could not locate their names in the lists shown.
Another cause for concern is possible large scale misuse of
Identification Certificate for Election (ICE) forms. These are produced
by the NEC to allow a person who is registered to vote, but has lost all
forms of identification used to identify themselves, to vote at polling
stations. To obtain an ICE, two witnesses must affirm that the person
lives in the commune where the person is registered to vote.
ICEs are issued with the signature of commune authorities, 97.4
percent of which are headed by CPP members. ICEs have been issued for
the July 28 elections from 2011 through July 12, 2013. ICEs are supposed
to have photographs attached, but many have been issued without
photographs, according to persons who have reviewed the forms in the
countryside.
The NEC says 480,000 ICEs have been issued. Official provincial
election commission reports seen by Human Rights Watch specify that
these include 99,733 ICEs in Battambang, 61,320 in Svay Rieng, and
56,228 in Pursat. Election monitoring organizations have expressed
concern to Human Rights Watch that the large number of ICEs issued could
be used to increase votes for the CPP in highly contested
constituencies.
Partisan Campaigning by Members of the Security Forces and Civil Servants
For months, officers of Cambodia’s security forces and officials of the
state civil service have been openly campaigning for the CPP and Hun
Sen.
The partisanship of the military and police have created an
intimidating atmosphere for voters in many parts of the country. Relying
on official and semiofficial media reports, Human Rights Watch has
extensively
documented
the systemic and open support of senior and local military and police
officers for a CPP election victory, and in particular Hun Sen’s
continuation as prime minister.
Those involved include the military supreme commander, Pol Saroeun;
the chairman of the joint military general staff, Kun Kim; the army
commander, Meas Sophea; the national gendarmerie commander, Sao Sokha;
the national police commissioner, Net Savoeun; and two of Hun Sen’s sons
who are generals in the armed forces, Hun Manet and Hun Manit. Many of
these are members of top CPP leadership bodies and concurrently heads of
CPP “work teams” assigned to organize and mobilize voting for the CPP
in the provinces.
Opposition leaders and activists told Human Rights Watch that they
live with the constant fear that if Hun Sen and the CPP perceive them as
posing any real electoral threat, the military and police will again be
ordered to suppress them, including through arbitrary arrests and
extrajudicial killings. “It’s always in the back of our minds,” one
opposition candidate told Human Rights Watch.
Declarations by government, military, and National Election Committee
officials on July 24 that military and police officers can campaign for
the CPP only heighten concern about their partisanship.
Human Rights Watch monitoring of official and semiofficial media
found that virtually all provincial, municipal, district, and ward
governors, who are appointed civil servants, not elected officials, have
also been actively campaigning for the CPP and Hun Sen. Many are
identified as heads of the CPP organization in the areas they govern as
state officials.
National civil servants have also been deployed to stump for the CPP
by elected officials who turn ministries under their control into
pro-CPP institutions. Officials at one national ministry told Human
Rights Watch that its minister has worked via the ministry hierarchy to
organize subordinate officials to work openly for a CPP victory in the
province to which he is assigned as head of a CPP “grassroots
strengthening” team. One official explained, “If the minister tells
someone to go, they have to go.” An opposition activist from this
province told Human Rights Watch that, “They want the people to be
afraid that opposing the CPP means opposing the state, which people will
fear is dangerous.”
