Land

Construction at the controversial Lower Sesan II dam site in Stung Treng province has already begun, according to villagers, who will today petition several ministries, the Chinese embassy and the headquarters of the Royal Group to open negotiations with them. According to the villagers, who travelled ...

Mondulkiri villagers seized seven chainsaws on Tuesday from illegal loggers claiming to be selling timber to logging tycoon Try Pheap’s company. A group of ethnic Pnong villagers came across the three illegal loggers during a patrol of their community forest on Tuesday, according to Bil Vanthy, ...

Authorities in Pursat’s Krakor district yesterday ordered a cassava company to stop clearing land on which more than 60 families claim they have planted rice and other crops since 1997, villagers and a company official said. Following protests in Anlong Tnort commune on Tuesday, villager Lim ...

More than 60 wooden homes in Pursat province were burned to the ground Wednesday by officials in Veal Veng district, who claimed that the owners were living on state land, rights group Licadho said. “On Wednesday morning, police, military police, RCAF soldiers and the deputy provincial ...

NGOS have accused logging tycoon Try Pheap’s MDS Import-Export Company – which had a licence to clear forest during the construction of the Stung Atai hydropower dam in Pursat – of continuing to log the area despite the dam being finished. Ouch Leng, director of the ...

Residents embroiled in a long-running land dispute in the Borei Keila area of Phnom Penh’s Prampi Makara district on Wednesday tore down three metal fences and occupied an unfinished apartment block at the site. The fences were felled with axes by irate residents, who took the ...

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 ...

The government on Monday agreed to a comprehensive solution for rural families who have lost their land to well-connected agricultural plantations exporting sugar to the European Union (E.U.) duty free and will meet again early next month to discuss details. The decision was made at a ...

About 200 families from Mondulkiri’s Keo Seima district filed a complaint on Sunday against a Vietnamese-owned company alleged to have razed more than 3,500 hectares of community forest since 2010, villagers and a rights group said yesterday. A rubber concessionaire identified as Sovan Reachsey has been ...

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 ...

A brigadier general in the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) whose home and rubber plantation in Mondolkiri province were raided by police over the weekend said Monday that he was not responsible for the dozens of pieces of illegal luxury wood confiscated during two separate ...

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 ...

In the weeks that 17-year-old garment worker Yon Chea languished in prison, he spent hours staring out of the window at a concrete wall, certain that he would never see his home or his family again. “I never thought I would get out. There was a ...

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 ...

The Ministry of Defence will dispatch more than 300 members of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) to Mali as part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission, a senior government official said yesterday. ...

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 ...

A commune police officer has been summonsed to appear at Ratanakkiri’s provincial court on Friday after 10 villagers filed lawsuits against him in September for his alleged involvement in illegal logging in a community forest and for threatening them with a rifle, villagers and the ...

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 ...

The government has granted 322 hectares of state-owned teak forest in the newly formed Tbong Khmum province to the Interior Ministry so that the land can be used to build a new provincial capital, the Interior Ministry said Wednesday. “The government has decided to use more ...

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 ...

The Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC) said Wednesday that it has closed its investigation into a fire at an equipment repair workshop in Battambang City on January 24 that destroyed equipment and vehicles worth an estimated $400,000. Heng Ratana, CMAC’s director-general, said that the fire had ...

Three Ministers from the Ministry of Urbanization and Construction, Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the Ministry of Environment have met to jointly set out work-plan to manage state’s land and natural resources. The work-plan will be undertaken in line with the Government’s land policy introduced ...