Land policy and administration

In their final deployment as part of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s national land-titling program, 55 student youth volunteers will be sent to measure 50,000 hectares of land following a nearly six-month moratorium on the program. The deployment was officially launched at a ceremony in Kandal province ...

Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan said Tuesday that the country will expedite overland boundary demarcation with Cambodia and expects to fully complete the process by 2015. Speaking at a meeting with Cambodian Parliament Chief Heng Samrin, Nhan said that so far, the two countries ...

Cambodia’s Apsara National Authority, which manages Angkor Archaeological Park, will this week unveil a “revolutionary” new concept for Angkor’s management that will vastly decentralize responsibility for the preservation of the temple complex, according to Anne Lemaistre, Unesco representative in Cambodia. The new Angkor Heritage Management Framework, ...

In an effort to put a stop to land swaps in Phnom Penh, City Hall has called on state institutions with offices in Chamkar Mon district’s Tonle Bassac commune to register or re-register for land titles, a municipal official said Sunday. A letter signed by ...

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 ...

Less than a week after she was released from prison pending a retrial on controversial criminal charges laid down last year, housing rights activist Yorm Bopha on Thursday led a march of about 500 people to deliver a petition calling on the government to end ...

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 ...

Local NGOs on Friday urged more participation in land dispute resolution by the nation’s youth. Youth participation can mean better laws, better application of those laws and greater respect for citizens, “especially for farmers and the poor,” said Chhit Sam Ath, executive director of the NGO ...

A land dispute between a development company and residents in Phnom Penh’s Russei Keo district boiled over late Friday night, with villagers setting fire to an excavator that they say company staff were using to raze a crematorium on the disputed plot of land. Villagers say ...

Shelving any thoughts that 14 months in prison had deterred her from protesting, Yorm Bopha rushed to the capital’s Borei Keila community yesterday morning to try to stop authorities from forcing evictees from an abandoned building. Bopha was one of about 10 Boeung Kak activists called ...

Like most millennium-old structures discovered in the forests of Cambodia, the locals had known all along about this one. Jarai minority villagers in this remote spot in Ratanakkiri province’s O’Yadaw district not only knew about it, but they revered the red-brick temple, using it as a ...

The Vietnamese Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) company, the majority shareholder of several economic land concessions in Ratanakkiri province, on Friday rebuffed accusations that it had logged forests and forced evictions, claiming that its activities improved the environment and the livelihoods of locals. Through several companies, ...

The assistant of a lumber tycoon accused of major deforestation and forced evictions rejected Thursday the findings of a recent report by local rights groups. The Cambodian Human Rights Task Force said in its report that some 1,400 families had been pushed from their land by ...

The government is set to start re-deploying student volunteers to measure and demarcate plots of land across the country as part of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s land-titling scheme, which was briefly suspended ahead of July’s national election. The program was announced by the prime minister in ...

A district-level Environment Ministry official in Ratanakkiri province on Wednesday claimed that he had no way to determine the legality of logging operations by firms with private land concessions inside the province’s Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary. The claim by Chou Sopheak, director of Lumphat district’s environment department, ...

An “unofficial” land concession granted earlier this year to an agro-industry firm that has logged luxury hardwood in Ratanakkiri province’s Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary is in violation of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s 2012 moratorium on new economic land concessions (ELCs), a government spokesman said Tuesday. Phay Siphan, ...

More than 600 families living along the Siem Reap riverside are to be relocated at the beginning of next year by the government, a top provincial official said yesterday. The families will be evicted as part of a provincial government plan to widen the river to ...

Environmental campaign group Global Witness on Thursday called on the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Deutsche Bank to divest immediately from a Vietnamese firm whose rubber plantations in Cambodia are accused of rampant illegal logging and forced evictions of indigenous communities. The call came exactly six ...

Minister of Water Resources and Meteorology Lim Kean Hor said Monday that he would seek an investigation into a $1.5-million haul of river sand exported to India in April in spite of a ban on the export of dredged sand handed down by Prime Minister ...

Koh Kong Sugar has offered to settle its yearslong dispute with Cambodian families who accuse its plantations of stealing their land, but the farmers remain wary of being able to secure a fair deal. The firm, a subsidiary of Thailand’s Khon Kaen Sugar Industry Limited (KSL), ...

Declaring that it has “zero tolerance” towards land grabbing, Coca-Cola has agreed to investigate a long running case in Cambodia where villagers are seeking court action against a company accused of seizing their land to make way for plantations linked to the supply of sugar ...

Fauna and Flora International says its has found three previously unknown populations of the endangered Indochinese hog deer in Cambodia. “This is a remarkable discovery given not only the species’ vulnerability to hunting, but also because all of the sites were outside the existing protected area ...

Cambodia has seen a 46 percent rise in dry rubber export in the first ten months of 2013 thanks to rising global demand, said the report of the Commerce Ministry on Friday. The country exported 62,915 tons of dry rubber during the January-October period this year, ...

Defence lawyers representing well-known businesswoman Chhin Sokountheary, also known as the “Crocodile Grandma”, requested the Court of Appeal to consider voiding the tycoon’s warrant for arrest yesterday. Sokountheary was convicted for encroaching on public land and sentenced in absentia to four years and six months in ...