Bangkok: The Turnbull government is attempting to salvage Australia's $55 million agreement to send refugees to Cambodia at a time when the country's leader, Hun Sen, has launched the worst crackdown on freedoms in recent memory.
Australian officials on Nauru have convinced two Iranian refugees to take a one-way ticket to Phnom Penh by portraying the south-east Asian nation as a kind of tropical utopia with no violent crime, refugee advocates say.
But Cambodia's security forces are behind escalating political intimidation, the suppression of political expression and restrictions on freedom of assembly, according to opposition figures and human rights groups.
In a report released on Thursday, Human Rights Watch linked Mr Hun Sen's bodyguard unit to an attack outside Cambodia's parliament last October in which two opposition MPs were dragged from their cars and beaten, kicked and stomped unconscious.
The New York-based organisation detailed a cover-up to protect those who planned and organised the attack while three junior soldiers who were put on trial refused to identify them.
"From start to finish the assault had all the hallmarks of an operation carried out by Cambodian state security forces," Human Rights Watch said, adding it was brazen even in a country where for decades security forces have been responsible for harassment, threats, arbitrary arrests, prosecutions and physical attacks against political opponents, civil society activists and anyone deemed critical of the ruling party.
Mr Hun Sen's personal unit has long been notorious for serious human rights violations, including a 1997 grenade attack on an opposition rally that killed at least 16 and injured more than 150.
Cambodia's human rights organisation LICADHO said the government's assault on its critics has intensified since last year, and the number of political prisoners has risen to 29 as the authorities have made increasing use of the criminal justice system to persecute dissenters.
Those detained include human rights investigators, opposition MPs, student representatives and environmental activists.
Youth activists aligned with Mr Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party have whipped up an alleged sex scandal involving Kem Sokha, deputy president of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, and a young hairdresser.
The youths demanded that Mr Kem Sokha face legal consequences for the affair that was purportedly exposed in recordings published on-line, while police arrested four members of the local human rights group Adhoc and a member of the National Election Committee, all of whom were accused of bribing the hairdresser to deny the affair.
When Ou Virak, head of the Future Forum policy institute and a respected political commentator, described the scandal as a political confection he was sued for defamation.
The United Nations human rights agency described the arrests as "politically motivated persecutions" and pointed to "woefully flawed due process".
Five officials of Mr Kem Sokha's party, including two MPs, are also in jail on various charges while the party's president Sam Rainsy remains in Paris, fearful of returning to Phnom Penh to face defamation and other charges.
Sebastian Strangio, an Australian analyst and author of Hun Sen's Cambodia, said the crackdown reached a new low on May 9 when eight human rights defenders were arrested merely for the unauthorised wearing of black T-shirts.
Though the group were later released, Strangio wrote in the Phnom Penh Post that the arrests were a typical example of Cambodia's paranoid politics where there is a tendency to see any stirring of opposition, however small, as a threat to social cohesion and national survival.
"For more than two decades Hun Sen has deftly alternated periods of pressure with periods of calm in just the right balance to cripple his opponents and maintain the grudging support of foreign donor governments," he wrote. "But while the frequency remains the same, the amplitude is rising."
Mr Hun Sen, a former commander of the murderous Khmer Rouge who defected to Vietnam in the late 1970s, has remained in power for more than three decades.
In long rambling speeches on national television he has compared himself to great Cambodian historical figures.
Early in May, state officials ordered Cambodia's media to use Mr Hun Sen's official titles in the opening line of any print, radio or television articles about him.
Mr Hun Sen's title is Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techno Hun Sen, which according to Associated Press translates into "princely exalted supreme great commander of gloriously victorious troops".
Only five refugees on Nauru have agreed to resettle in Cambodia since then immigration minister Scott Morrison signed the controversial agreement with Cambodia at a ceremony toasted with champagne in late 2014.
Three of them have returned to their countries of origin despite having well founded fears of persecution there and Fairfax Media has revealed that the two remaining in Phnom Penh are deeply unhappy and want to quit the country.
