News

The U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, Raquel Rolnik, has waded in to the furor surrounding the imprisonment this week of two anti-eviction activists from Boeng Kak and Borei Keila communities, posing with a poster calling for the release of the two women. Yorm Bopha, 32, ...

The Phnom Penh Municipal Court yesterday questioned three Borei Keila residents about a complaint they filed six month ago against the property development firm Phanimex from evicting them from their land. In March, a group of Borei Keila residents filed their complaint against Phanimex’s owner ...

Police and court officials yesterday questioned, charged and imprisoned elderly woman involved in the long-running land dispute at the Borei Keila community in Phnom Penh, a day after an anti-eviction protester from Boeng Kak community met a similar fate. In both cases, police and court officials ...

A 65-year-old woman who has spent months sleeping under a staircase at Borei Keila yesterday became the second land-rights activist sent to Prey Sar prison in little more than 24 hours. Phnom Penh Municipal Court investigating judge Ly Leabmeng questioned villager representative Tim Sakmony for almost ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen will personally deliver land titles to residents in Kratie province’s Snuol district on September 21 following the completion of the land measuring mission by volunteer youth there.   According to the premier’s order, land titles have been granted in three forms of ...

A okyo-based human rights group has called on the government to cease forced evictions and branded the use of armed forces against ordinary citizens defending their land as an :unforgivable human rights violation.” Human Rights Now (HRN), which in June sent a team of Japanese investigators ...

Since 2009, local human rights group Adhoc has documented 623 cases of land conflict in the country, yet only a little more than 10 percent of those cases were brought to court. The statistics highlight the lack of trust ordinary Cambodians have in the court system, says Adhoc, ...

Sixty-nine families in Phnom Penh’s Russei Keo district have been ordered by the government to move from a 4,000-meter-square plot of land claimed by a local businessman, according to district authorities. The disputed area is part of a 9-hectare plot of land in Svay Pak commune owned by ...

Two months after their release from Prey Sar prison, members of the so-called Boeung Kak 13 were yesterday at the forefront of more calls for authorities to mark out land promised to their community. About 50 Boeung Kak women and children gathered outside to urge authorities to ...

A mission to examine political rights in Cambodia has been increasingly overshadowed by the Kingdom’s dire land rights situation, the 2012 report from Cambodia’s UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights, published yesterday, shows. Cambodia’s rapporteur, Surya Subedi, conducted two fact-finding missions to Cambodia ...

Dozens of women and children from Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak neighborhood demonstrated in front of the Ministry of Woman’s Affairs yesterday to demand that the minister recant her claim that they had attacked police during a June 27 protest in which one of the women ...

Chinese firm Hainan Ruijin Investment Holding Company (HRIH) has announced an ambitious, US$5.8 billion property project including holiday resorts and high-rise apartments outside of Sihanoukville. Plans for the development, which has been dubbed Sihanoukville-Hainan City, have been approved by the Cambodian government. Further details, such as the ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday said that the government had identified nearly 100,000 families who are now considered eligible for land titles, and that plans were in store to locate hundreds of thousands more in the coming month. Speaking at the inauguration of a new 128-km stretch of ...

Cambodian soldiers and police have been clearing undergrowth with pesticides and using bulldozers to bring down trees in an area of community forest, according to local groups. The alleged land seizure at the 1,335 hectare (3,300 acre) Prey Trolach commune forest, a four-hour drive from the ...

Inner city students enlisted into Prime Minister Hun Sen’s nationwide land-titling program have been getting a taste of the rural life and some of them are ready to come home. Prepped with a two-day crash course in surveying, more than 1,000 youths have been dispatched across ...

Authorities in Stung Treng province have released the names of five government officials whom they arrested on Tuesday in Samki commune for interfering with a corps of youth volunteers sent to measure land as part of the prime minister’s national initiative to grant property to ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday 700 volunteers from the Cambodian People’s Party had fanned out across eight provinces to measure properties and provide titles to villagers who have been displaced by land disputes. Speaking to about 10,000 villagers in the Kroch Chhmar district of Kampong ...

Prak Thon says he will give up everything to stop a Chinese company from destroying his pagoda in Koh Kong province’s Kiri Sakor district. “I’ll allow them to demolish my house, but I will not allow them to destroy the pagoda. I’m satisfied if I die, ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday urged people to resolve their own land disputes to aid the progress of an ambitious land-titling project announced earlier this month. Speaking at an event in Kompong Cham province’s Kroch Chhmar district to mark National Fish Day, Mr. Hun Sen thanked ...

Tens of thousands of families – many of them currently embroiled in land disputes – will be eligible for land titles under an ambitious policy announced by Prime Minister Hun Sen last week, government officials said yesterday. On June 14, Mr. Hun Sen announced an ...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has given approval to grant state-owned land to three private companies despite issuing a temporary ban on land concessions, drawing criticism from local NGOs concerned about increasingly frequent land disputes in the country. Copies of three subdecrees obtained by RFA showed ...

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Thursday gave authorities six months to end a spate of land disputes pitting developers against villagers that have sparked increasingly violent protests. Hun Sen ordered officials to visit contested areas and issue deeds to families facing illegal evictions, a move ...

While preliminary results from Sunday’s commune elections indicate that the SRP took a thumping in urban centers—the SRP lost all three of their commune chief positions in Phnom Penh—the party appears to have made gains in rural areas locked in land disputes. Though the figures are ...

Just days ahead of Sunday’s commune elections, Prime Minister Hun Sen again broke his pledge to remain silent during his party’s campaign period and sought to ease the concerns of communities whose livelihoods have been threatened by land disputes. Speaking to villagers through a mobile telephone, ...