Garment protest trial defendants deny charges
Defendants in a mass trial of 25 men and teenagers accused of joining a string of violent garment worker protests continued to profess their innocence during the second day of hearings at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Tuesday. Twenty-three of the men were arrested in January during protests for higher garment factory wages that ended abruptly after military police shot into crowds of demonstrators outside a Phnom Penh factory on January 3, killing five people and injuring more than 40. The other two defendants were arrested during a clash between police and garment factory workers near Stung Meanchey bridge in November. … In a separate room of the courthouse, 10 men arrested at a protest outside the Yakjin garment factory on January 2 were also back on trial. Three of the men were questioned Tuesday, all of whom insisted they were innocent bystanders set upon by police without provocation. … Yet to be questioned is the most high profile of the defendants, Vorn Pao, president of the Independent Democracy of Informal Economy, or IDEA, a union of tuk-tuk drivers and moto-taxi drivers. He did not leave the court without a word, though. “We need freedom, we need justice,” he yelled as court officers bundled him into a van for the trip back to prison. Outside the court, police had once again blocked off either end of Monireth Boulevard to keep hundreds of protesters from getting anywhere near the building. Police in riot gear stood by, and at each end of the street, behind a line of metal barricades, fire trucks were parked with their water cannon facing the crowd. To prevent protesters from squeezing through cracks in the barricades, as some did during the first day of hearings last month, police bound them tightly together with metal wires. …
Khy Sovuthy and Eang Mengleng
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/garment-protest-trial-defendants-deny-charges-58166/
