Land tenure and land titling

In 2009, a railway project official arrived at 45-year-old Ry Preng’s home in Por Sen Chey district and spray-painted “1.042” in red on the side of his house. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but was told that at some point he would need to ...

More than a dozen ethnic minority communities from Cambodia’s northeast filed a complaint with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) on Monday, accusing it of breaking its own safeguard policies by investing in rubber plantations they say are stealing their land and illegally logging their forests. The ...

Teng Khorn’s living room is under a tree, his bedroom in a boat hauled up on a slipway for caulking beside the mangroves that lead to his source of income: the sea. His choice of abode is also his act of defiance against the monolithic Chinese ...

Some of the hundreds of families losing land and community forest to Vietnamese-owned rubber plantations in Cambodia’s northeast will this week file a complaint with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) over the investment it has made in the plantations’ parent company. Eang Vuthy, executive director of ...

Newly approved plans by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to fix mistakes it made on a $143 million railway project appear to water down recommendations proposed by the Bank’s own review panel, and could impose the costs of the plan on the very families who ...

About 200 villagers locked in a land dispute with the Chinese-owned Union Development Group (UDG) in Koh Kong province said they were warned on Friday that “paratroopers” would be brought in if they continued to block a road to the company’s headquarters in Botum Sakor ...

About 140 villagers in Koh Kong province set up a roadblock for the second consecutive day Thursday, demanding compensation from a Chinese company they say burned down their homes to make way for part of a multibillion-dollar tourist resort, according to a rights worker and ...

The director of a CPP senator’s sugar plantation accused of stealing land from hundreds of families said Wednesday that most locals were happy with the new jobs the plantation has generated, a week after a visiting European Union parliamentarian renewed calls for an investigation of ...

Four villagers locked in a land dispute with an agribusiness firm in Banteay Meanchey province said Tuesday that they had been summonsed to the provincial court over a property damage lawsuit filed by the company. The suit was originally filed last year, but villagers said they ...

Twelve representatives of 50 families in Preah Vihear’s Kulen district filed an appeal yesterday after being summonsed to court over a land dispute with a Malaysian company. The villagers gathered in Adhoc’s office in Srayrong commune to draft and submit a letter requesting that their court ...

Work on a $143 million donor project to renovate the country’s creaking railway system, which is already over budget and years behind schedule, is now indefinitely postponed due to a lack of funds, with more than 300 km of rail still to be laid, a ...

Mak Sambath, deputy chairman of the government’s Human Rights Committee, came under fire Monday from activists who accused him of lying to the U.N. in Geneva regarding land issues and the displacement of affected people. The criticism of Mr. Sambath’s report to the U.N.’s Human Rights ...

Sugar plantations that benefit from the European Union’s Everything But Arms (EBA) scheme, which allows preferential access to the E.U.’s market, have further impoverished Cambodia’s poor, and an investigation needs to be launched, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) said on Friday. Patrice Tirolien, MEP ...

Authorities burned one house and demolished three others in the past two days in Koh Kong’s Botum Sakor and Kiri Sakor districts in the latest development in the long-running land dispute between villagers and Tianjin Union Development Group, community representatives and the rights group Adhoc ...

More than 40 fresh land rows have emerged across the country – and many more could be going unreported, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) said yesterday. A study CCHR conducted into land conflicts between 2011 and 2013 has resulted in the rights group publishing ...

At least 41 new land disputes were reported in Cambodia last year despite a government moratorium on the widespread grant of so-called economic land concessions, a rights group said Thursday. The new cases in 17 locations—including the capital Phnom Penh—added to the 223 land conflicts previously ...

Representatives of Chinese company Tianjin Union Development Group, backed by soldiers, annihilated crops and burned the homes of 29 families in Koh Kong’s Botum Sakor district last week, rights groups say. According to a report given to the Post yesterday, a two-day fact-finding mission spearheaded by ...

About 150 members of the former Dey Krahorm community in Phnom Penh’s Chamkar Mon district marked the fifth anniversary on Friday of the day mechanical excavators, security guards and authorities destroyed their homes to make room for a real estate project. Much like on past anniversaries, ...

Phnom Penh deputy governor Khuong Sreng oversaw the demarcation of five more plots of land Thursday in the city’s Boeng Kak neighborhood, where at least 48 families are still fighting for formal land titles. Some 3,000 families have been evicted from the neighborhood since the city ...

Three NGOs on Wednesday called on ANZ Royal Bank to help the hundreds of families who have lost farmland to a sugar plantation that the bank helped to finance in Kompong Speu province. The NGOs also made public a 2013 social and environmental impact assessment of ...

Representatives of Chinese company Tianjin Union Development Group, backed by soldiers, began tearing down villagers’ houses in Koh Kong province yesterday, community representatives and a district governor said. Botum Sakor district governor On Phearak said yesterday that company representatives had come to clear the residents’ ...

More than 200 families filed a complaint with the Preah Vihear provincial court yesterday against two employees of logging tycoon Try Pheap who allegedly cleared 15 hectares of community forest late last year before being stopped by villagers. Huon Kino, 39, a representative of the 203 ...

Hun Sen’s army of student land measurers may have marked ground for them in 2012, but representatives of about 20 ethnic families in Ratanakkiri province said yesterday that their combined 50 hectares of land has now been invaded by hordes of families digging for gems. Chhay ...

Phnom Penh governor Pa Socheatvong on Friday visited evicted residents of the Borei Keila community, now living in a slum atop piles of garbage near their former homes, and promised, yet again, to build proper housing for the 150 families who refuse to move from ...