Public land lease

Security guards from a Chinese development firm in Koh Kong province have allegedly prevented civil society groups from gathering data they planned to use for a petition asking for compensation for evictees. ...

The constant hum of chainsaws almost drowned out Buddhist monk Sam Kim Sath, 65, as he stood this week in a wildlife sanctuary on Oral Mountain, Cambodia’s highest peak. Forest in the Phnom Oral Wildlife Sanctuary, in the eastern part of the Cardamoms, is being “obliterated” ...

Police briefly detained 13 garment factory workers on Thursday after about 20,000 workers, some throwing rocks, continued a strike that began Monday in Svay Rieng province’s Bavet City over wages and working conditions, a union official and police said. Union leaders had on Wednesday evening agreed ...

An estimated 30,000 garment factory workers will resume work this morning after three days of strike action ended Wednesday when Svay Rieng provincial officials promised to help the strikers achieve their demands from factory owners. The mass strike led the owner of the Tai Seng Special ...

A representative of the Try Pheap Group said Tuesday that villagers in Pursat province who attempted to march to a public forum on Monday to ask authorities to intervene in a land dispute would not receive any further compensation after losing the right to the ...

The Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone (PPSEZ) plans to raise money to fund an expansion through an initial public offering, a senior official from the Securities and Exchange Commission of Cambodia (SECC) said yesterday. If successful, PPSEZ could become one of the few companies to list on ...

Land certificates handed out by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s youth volunteers have been seized by local authorities in some parts of the country and sold on to companies, a forum on land rights was told yesterday, amid reports of rising numbers of land conflicts. Speaking at ...

The Vietnamese embassy fired back yesterday at opposition party leader Sam Rainsy’s claim that Vietnamese companies granted economic land concessions in Prey Lang forest are turning the area into a Vietnamese “colony”. On Wednesday, Rainsy visited the forest and claimed that CRCK, a Vietnamese firm granted ...

Credit Suisse, a financial services firm based in Switzerland, has been accused of aiding land grabbing in Cambodia by becoming a major shareholder in Vietnamese rubber giant Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) Group. In a statement released today, Global Witness (GW), an NGO based in England, ...

Civil society groups held a workshop in Phnom Penh on Thursday in which government officials and lawmakers were invited to discuss post-election land grabs and land-based conflict, although the ruling CPP failed to turn up to the event. Though incidents of land-grabbing appeared to decrease ahead ...

Cambodia’s opposition leader called Wednesday for a halt to land concessions granted by the government to foreign companies in the country’s vast Prey Lang Forest, calling for greater protection of one of Southeast Asia’s last remaining lowland evergreen woodlands. Cambodia National Rescue Party President Sam ...

Communities threatened by the planned construction of three hydropower dams in Stung Treng and Ratanakkiri provinces will today submit to the Chinese Embassy a petition demanding that the embassy intervene against Chinese companies investing in the dams. The petition, to be presented in Chinese, Khmer and ...

An indigenous Bunong minority community in Mondolkiri province’s Keo Seima district on Wednesday filed a complaint claiming that authorities had destroyed their homes, but authorities allege that the villagers are living on land owned by a private company. Villagers claim that since November, 37 homes in ...

Well-known timber magnate Try Pheap is preparing to expand cross-country with a scheme that already gives him exclusive rights to buy all the wood felled on economic land concessions (ELCs) in Ratanakkiri province, a spokesman for the businessman said. The Agriculture Ministry’s Forestry Administration in February ...

ASX-listed junior Brighton Mining Group on Wednesday announced that it would buy two unlisted companies to gain control of high-grade manganese project in Indonesia, and gold projects in Cambodia. Brighton Mining holds a 70% shareholding in Summer Gold Investments, which holds two mineral concession areas ...

Global Witness, a United Kingdom-based NGO, has alleged that Deutsche Bank has dropped the majority of its holdings in a Vietnamese company that operates rubber plantations in Cambodia, amid accusations the firm is involved in land grabbing and illegal logging. In a statement released today, Global ...

Stung Treng Provincial Court yesterday questioned six men apprehended while allegedly transporting more than 17 cubic metres of illegal Thnong timber by boat in Sesan district, said Y Ek Savtey, director of the provincial forestry administration. Hou Sam Ol, a provincial coordinator with rights group Adhoc, ...

Local watchdog groups say they have been forced to take forest protection into their hands, due to a failure of government to do so. “As we have seen: the National Assembly, the Senate and the government do not work,” Ouch Leng, head of the Cambodian Human ...

A US-based group of lawyers has launched an online campaign to raise funding to support a lawsuit against a UK company that bought sugar from a Cambodian plantations linked to human rights abuses. The campaign is being undertaken by the International Senior Lawyers Project, which is ...

A district-level Environment Ministry official on Thursday retracted comments he made last week when he claimed proper monitoring of logging inside Ratanakkiri province’s Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary was impossible because his ministry did not know the boundaries of private land concessions in the protected zone. On November ...

A private agro-industrial company has come under fire from villagers in Ratanakkiri province who say it has illegally felled resin-producing trees that are their main source of income. More than 1,000 trees in the Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary in Ratanakkiri’s Lumphat district are under threat, the villagers ...

Former Environment Minister Mok Mareth on Tuesday accused the media of having “twisted the truth” in reporting on illegal logging in Ratanakkiri province, where rights groups and independent forestry monitors say the natural environment is being pillaged and ethnic minority communities impoverished by illegal loggers ...

Local communities that lost their land via economic land concessions to private companies are now being paid by those same firms to illegally fell the trees that once sustained their livelihoods, a group of five advocacy groups contended yesterday. At a press conference, the NGOs singled ...

Nearly 70 representatives from 278 families in Preah Vihear’s Rovieng district are seeking intervention after a national mining company began drilling on their farmland last week, locals said yesterday. According to villager Yean Bunchan, 47, representatives from a company based in Kandal province called T P ...