World Bank’s Boeng Kak Failure Cited in UN Report
The U.N.’s expert on housing rights has cited the World Bank’s failure to help thousands of families evicted from Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak neighborhood as a prime example of why the bank needs to make human rights a focus of its land sector programs worldwide. At the heart of the criticism is an internal investigation of the World Bank’s $24.3 million land titling project in Cambodia, which concluded in 2010. According to the investigation, the World Bank-funded project had failed the people of Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak, where more than 3,000 families were evicted illegally by the government after they were denied land titles that should have been provided to them under the bank project. … In a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva last week, Raquel Rolnik, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on adequate housing, made several recommendations to the World Bank and cited its land titling debacle in Cambodia as why it ought to put human rights front and center in any land sector program. … “Design flaws in the project led to the arbitrary exclusion of lands from the titling process and…this denied residents, especially the poor and vulnerable, the opportunity to claim and formalize their pre-existing rights through the adjudication process under [the project],” the inspection panel found.
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/world-banks-boeng-kak-failure-cited-in-un-report-14120/
