July 10, 2025

The Khmer Movement for Democracy (KMD) condemns the plan to make arbitrary changes to Cambodia’s constitution to enable the government to strip its critics of Cambodian nationality.

The constitutional change, announced by former Prime Minister Hun Sen, is a further violation of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements on Cambodia.

The Agreements state that “All persons in Cambodia and all Cambodian refugees and displaced persons shall enjoy the rights and freedoms embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality”.

The immediate target of the change is Sam Rainsy, former finance minister and co-founder of the banned opposition the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP). Sam Rainsy, who lives in forced exile in Paris, in June criticized the government for its complicity in organized cyber-crime in Cambodia. Rather than addressing the issue of cyber-crime, the response of Hun Sen was to find a way to change the constitution to remove his nationality.

The issue is wider than the case of Sam Rainsy. The constitutional change is part of a long-term programme through which the government has sought to quash all dissent, whether inside or outside Cambodia.

Cambodia has not seen a free and fair election since that organized by the United Nations in 1993. The CNRP was dissolved by order of the country’s government-controlled supreme court in 2017. The last two national “elections” took place without any recognized opposition party being allowed to stand.

Kem Sokha, the leader of the CNRP when it was dissolved, remains under house detention, convicted under a treason charge for which no serious evidence was ever provided.

Not content with crushing domestic opposition and civil society, the government has carried out a strategy of transnational repression against critics within the global Cambodian diaspora, in countries as diverse as Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, the US and France. This strategy includes the political assassination of former CNRP member of parliament Lim Kimya, shot dead in Bangkok in January 2025.

A report made to the G7 by the KMD on transnational repression in June 2025 can be found here:

Khmer Movement for Democracy (KMD) Report to the G7 on Transnational Repression by the Cambodian Government – khmer Movement For Democracy

Families of diaspora members who are still living in Cambodia are routinely targeted by the regime as a way to stamp out dissent from aboard. But some critics of the government don’t have any family members, or business interests, in the country. There’s no obvious way to silence them beyond assassination.

The constitutional amendment seeks to close that gap, and means that any Cambodian in the world could be stripped of their nationality.

The KMD calls on signatories to the Paris Peace Agreements to reconvene to assess how implementation can be achieved. It calls on signatory countries to implement targeted sanctions, such as Global Magnitsky Act sanctions, against high-ranking Cambodian officials and their proxies demonstrably involved in ordering or executing acts of transnational repression.