Land

The Cambodian Center for Human Rights says that a company with a controversial economic land concession in Koh Kong province banned the centre’s officers from photographing the area and ordered police to grab their cameras. Officers from CCHR traveled to Sre Ambel district on December 14 ...

From a devilish-looking bat to a frog that sings like a bird, scientists have identified 126 new species in the Greater Mekong area, the WWF said Tuesday in a new report detailing discoveries in 2011. But from forest loss to the construction of major hydropower projects ...

Ethnic minority Kreung villagers filed a complaint against commune level authorities on Saturday for allegedly accepting money from a businessman to clear their ancestral land for a new rubber plantation in Ratanakkiri province, local NGOs and villagers said. ...

Mikasa Corporation, a famous Japanese sports goods manufacturing company, is to invest more than $5 million in building a ball production factory in Cambodia’s Koh Kong Special Economic Zone (KKSEZ) and plans to start construction early next year according to officials. Hiroshi Suzuki, chief executive ...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Monday he decided to choose environment protection, not to choose 30 billion U.S. dollar expected revenues from the exploitation of titanium ore in Southwestern Cambodia. “According to a feasibility study, titanium ore deposit in Chhiphat district in Koh Kong province ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has again ordered local officials to step up their efforts to stop illegal timber being cut down and transported from Cambodia’s forest’s in response to an apparent rise in forest crimes. Thousands of cubic meters of luxury wood, as well as ...

Lawmakers from Cambodia’s ruling party on Monday refused to accept a petition from hundreds of people who held a rally calling for the government’s help in resolving land disputes, drawing criticism from activists who questioned the effectiveness of the country’s parliament. The appeal, which contained more ...

Sixty families in Kompong Cham province’s Krathor district are planning to file a complaint with provincial authorities after local land management officials decided to take away their registration documents for land titles under Prime Minister Hun Sen’s recently launched titling program. Pon Pumm, 44 a farmer, ...

Cambodian authorities announced yesterday they would release six Laos who were arrested in Cambodia last Thursday on suspicion of illegal logging, provided that Laos cooperates with broader border negotiations in Stung Treng province’s Siam Pang district, where the men were arrested. Svay Nhoun, a Stung Treng ...

Widely different interpretations of the government’s land policy were voiced at a conference on Land Security and Housing Rights on Thursday in Phnom Penh, with civil servants defending mass relocations, while rural evictees spoke of being forced into poverty due to loss of their land. ...

The Phnom Penh Court of Appeal ruled Friday that Beehive Radio owner Mam Sonando should continue serving his 20-year sentence for sedition. On October 1, the radio station owner was sentenced to 20 years in jail and fined 10 million riel in relation to a ...

More than 250 ethnic Jarai families living in Ratanakkiri province’s O’Yadaw district filed a complaint with rights group Adhoc yesterday, after local officials demanded that the villagers apply for private land titles to protect their property from two Vietnamese rubber companies currently clearing their land, ...

A verdict in the land encroachment case against a prominent businesswoman was not delivered as expected yesterday, after a judge ordered the case be re-investigated due to a lack of evidence. Phnom Penh Municipal Court tried Chhin Sokountheary, director of Layimex Holdings Group, in absentia on ...

Canadian funding for ethnic minority communities in the process of applying for communal land titles will run out in March, and other donors have not yet signed up to take over the task, officials from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which currently provides the ...

Provincial forestry administration officials in Ratanakkiri have dismissed allegations of illegal logging by community residents and chalked the deforestation up to legitimate clearing. A cursory examination of the land in question yesterday seemed to back the company’s claims, Ly Sophan, a team worker at the provincial ...

Seven months after Prime Minister Hun Sen unveiled an ambitious plan to demarcate 1.8 million hectares of state land and formally acknowledge those who live on it, the completion of the first – albeit the smallest – of eight affected provinces has wrapped up. Marking the ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen appealed yesterday for developers and landowners in Kep City to build fences around their neglected properties to prevent vines from creeping onto the street of the coastal resort. Since much of the land in Kep City is owned by investors who live ...

The court system is still “chronically underfunded” and laws on its management are almost 20 years overdue, the U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi said yesterday. One year ago, during his sixth mission to Cambodia, Mr. Subedi described reform in the courts as moving at a ...

A final report from Thailand’s human rights commission on the alleged rights violations of a Thai company involved in two Cambodian sugar plantations is expected by late January, a member of the commission said. In July, the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand said its investigation ...

Nineteen families from Svay Pak commune in Russey Keo district protested for a second day Wednesday after their homes fell into the Tonle Sap River. Twenty-four houses along the river have been affected, they said. Although five have already left, the other 19 refuse to accept ...

The European Union’s ambassador to Cambodia yesterday urged the government to heed the advice of the U.N.’s visiting human rights envoy, who has come under increasing rebuke from officials for his unflattering reports. Addressing a crowd of about 3,000, mostly garment factory workers, at Phnom Penh’s ...

Despite a court-ordered land title in their favour, 163 families in Phnom Penh’s Sen Sok district last week watched excavators rip apart their homes at the behest of two district deputy governors. The forced eviction, denounced in a petition delivered on Friday to Prime Minister Hun ...

Economic land concessions granted to a pair of Vietnamese companies in Ratanakkiri’s O’Yadav district were endangering the traditional lifestyles of as many as 200 ethnic-minority families, villagerstold the Post yesterday. As the companies actively cleared forest to make room for the eventual rubber plantations, the government ...

U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi, who arrived in Cambodia Sunday on a five-day mission, spent yesterday, International Human Rights Day, in Kompong Chhnang province with about 300 villagers from a community embroiled in a long-running land dispute with the wife of a government minister. James ...