Irakli Katamadze, a Facebook user, posted a photo on February 27, 2021, showing a defendant with guards in a court. The photo comes with a caption, claiming that Cambodia proposed a death sentence for all those politicians who lie to their people. The author of the post endorses the idea and writes that a similar initiative should be enacted in Georgia.
Irakli Katamadze’s post is still being actively shared on social media. It had 3,825 shares as of April 13, 2021.
The claim that Cambodia considered introducing a death sentence for lying politicians is disinformation. Capital punishment has been abolished in Cambodia since 1989. (prestigeonline.com) The photo in the post shows a trial of the former leader of the Khmer Rouge, or the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who was tried not for lying to people, but for committing a genocide.
The capital punishment has been fully abolished in Cambodia since 1989. The Constitution of Cambodia from 1993 includes a paragraph on banning the capital punishment too. In 2007, 2008, and 2010, the Government of Cambodia actively supported the UN General Assembly resolutions on banning the capital punishment. Cambodia has the most extensive experience of banning the capital punishment among the countries of Asia. Although re-introducing the capital punishment for certain crimes was being discussed throughout the last years, it was never associated with the issue of politicians lying to the people. In 1995, Norodom Ranariddh, then Prime Minister of Cambodia, proposed the re-introduction of the death penalty for murderers and drug traffickers. In 2019, the current PM of Cambodia, Hun Sen, was considering introducing the death penalty as the highest punishment for people convicted of pedophilia. However, actual legal amendments have been made neither after the 1995, nor the 2019 statements.
The photo, attached to the disinformative post, shows Khieu Samphan, the former leader of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (or the Khmer Rouge regime). The photo was taken on November 16, 2018, nearly 40 years after the end of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979), at a tribunal, held with the support of the UN, where high officials of the Khmer Rouge regime were tried for the crimes against the Cambodian people, including the genocide of two million people. However, they were sentenced to life imprisonment, not death. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, created in conjunction with the UN, has been operating since 2009. Besides Samphan, the Tribunal has also tried three others for the same crime, but none of the convicts have been sentenced to death. The court sentenced them to life imprisonment.
Russian-speaking social media users have been disseminating the photo, shared by Irakli Katamadze, with similar captions in February 2021.
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