How Cambodia’s law on ‘freedom parks’ curtailed people’s right to protest

Cambodia's 2009 Law on Peaceful Demonstration promised a freedom park in every province where citizens could assemble without prior notice hassles. Seventeen years later, exactly one such park exists, in Phnom Penh, and authorities routinely deny or restrict its use anyway, including blocking eviction-hit communities in 2015, pandemic-era barricades in 2020, and bans on International Women's Day and Labor Day gatherings this year.

Rights groups flagged the law's flaws from the start: organizers must predict crowd sizes in advance or risk their protest being ruled illegal, and the law says nothing about spontaneous assemblies that by definition can't be scheduled. A 2017 replacement park was built far from the city center, hemmed in by warehouses, which human rights monitors say defeats the entire point of being seen or heard.

Civil society groups describe meetings where a handful of their representatives face down rooms of high-ranking officials who hand down decisions with little room for discussion. With commune and national elections approaching in 2027 and 2028, rights groups are calling for the law to be reviewed before it strangles what little public assembly remains.

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