What an edition of a Siam Reap newspaper reveals about law and politics in Cambodia and constraints on freedom of speech.

Fellow Pearls correspondent Jack Waterford used to tell his Canberra Times cadets, of which I was lucky to be one, that the best way to learn about a town was to spend a morning in its petty-sessions court and to read the local newspaper.

Sitting in a courtroom in Cambodia was going to be beyond the ken of this monolinguist so, sitting instead on a stool in a cool Siem Reap bar with a nice cold drink, I turned to the Kiripost on-line news site.

Kiripost is independent of government and bills itself as having a focus on business and tech news, while also covering “health, education, lifestyle and more”.

No mention of government or politics there, let alone the courts.

Maybe that was to be expected when all around town are posters praising the Cambodia People’s Party of that long-time political player Hun Sen.

The man who was head of government for the best part of four decades remains party president and is also currently President of the Senate.

He is flanked in the posters by Heng Samrin, President of the National Assembly from 2006 to 2023 after holding manifold other posts, in various parties, including as a Vietnamese-supported leader in the early 1980s after splitting from the........

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