News

Inside the grounds of this city’s old provincial hall, past a green corrugated iron fence, municipal street cleaners and their families are squatting in what was once a bustling government office filled with civil servants. Across the road, the former department of rural development is a ...

About 200 villagers from Phnom Penh’s Meanchey district who are involved in a long-running land dispute with two businessmen gathered outside the Court of Appeal on Tuesday, waiting to hear the verdict in their case—which was ultimately delayed. The villagers are representatives of 320 families in ...

An 18-year-old man became the third construction worker in three days to be killed on the job after part of a building collapsed on him and three co-workers – including two 15-year-olds – on Monday, police said. Yu Bunrong, from Kampong Cham province’s Koh Sotin district, ...

Villagers in Preah Vihear’s Kulen district are seeking the assistance of rights group Adhoc, claiming a Malaysian rubber company has stopped them from receiving land titles. Sok Yam, 48, one of the four representatives of the Sro Yong commune residents, said members of 72 families thumbprinted ...

Reporters in Cambodia seeking statistics from government ministries and departments are used to being given the brush-off from time to time, but in the run-up to the July 28 national election, things appear to have worsened. The Council for the Develop­ment of Cambodia (CDC) has for ...

The saga of the stalled $240 million Gold Tower 42 was revived last week when it emerged that a supplier for the project had accused the owner and builder of failing to pay out nearly $500,000 in fees, according to an injunction request obtained by ...

Fifteen villagers representing 18 families from Kratie province involved in an ongoing dispute with the Sovan Vuthy Rubber Company yesterday submitted a petition to the Ministry of Land Management calling for intervention after the company allegedly cleared their farmland. The families say they have lived ...

When a 100-metre-long section of a Phnom Penh garment factory crumpled in on itself like a cheap pup tent, Sen Sok district officials promised an investigation. The results of that investigation, which was to have taken place more than a year ago, in March 2012, ...

Employees at a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory in Kompong Speu province where two workers were killed when one of the building’s floors collapsed on Thursday have been ordered back to work today, despite ongoing concerns from labor activists about the building’s safety. While conceding that some parts ...

Three companies accused of illegal logging in Ratanakkiri province are in possession of a combined 30,000 hectares of economic land concessions (ELCs) that are likely illegal because they are owned by the same parent firm. Hoang Anh Andong Meas, Hoang Anh Lumphat and Hoang Anh Ouyadav ...

Fourteen Phnom Penh families claimed yesterday that government maps showing their houses in the path of a road-widening project were inaccurate and would condemn them to eviction without adequate compensation. Ek Malin, 57, a representative of the community on Street 347 in Tuol Kork district’s Boeung ...

Cambodia’s construction sector is facing a massive labor shortage due to a recent boom in construction projects throughout the country and workers migrating en masse to Thailand in search of higher wages. In 2012, the construction sector expanded rapidly with the total value of approved projects ...

Hundreds of indigenous minorities in Ratanakkiri province are being made worse off by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s land-titling scheme which, rather than securing their property rights, is contributing to the loss of their ancestral lands, according to a new report. The report supports complaints aired since ...

Since Prime Minister Hun Sen announced an ambitious new plan some 10 months ago to make nearly half a million families official land owners, hardly a week goes by that a rural community does not complain of local officials trying to scam the project. But when ...

2012 has been an impressive year for Cambodia’s economic resilience. Among the many sectors that had positively grown are the construction and property development [sic] and they are expected to be among the highest growth achievers in the current year as well. In 2012, the ...

People applying for land titles in urban areas are at a huge disadvantage compared to their rural counterparts due to the higher percentage of property disputes with powerful officials and businesspeople in the country’s cities, a new report on land registration has found. To improve ...

Seventy-two ethnic minorities Banong families received communal titles to a combined 1,008 hectares of ancestral land in Mondolkiri province yesterday morning in a ceremony attended by Land Management Minister Chhun Lim. Communal titles were designed to protect the ancestral lands of the country’s minorities from outside ...

Authorities in Battambang province on Saturday summoned two villagers from Salmot district’s Ta Sanh commune after they refused to hand over money to officials asking for donations to feed students working in the area as part of the government’s nationwide land titling project. Heng ...

The head of the country’s National Authority for Land Dispute Resolution on Wednesday said his authority was unable to resolve land disputes and that the responsibility for settling such disputes rested with the ministries responsible for handing out economic land concessions (ELCs) in the first ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen’s land-titling scheme announced in June originally included a directive for granting collective property titles to indigenous communities, but this part of the program was scrapped weeks later as it was deemed too costly and time-consuming, documents obtained yesterday show. For “indigenous ...

Senior official from across the government have started drafting a master plan that aims to map out the future locations of everything from roads to cities and development zones across the country. Land Management Minister Im Chhun Lim chaired the first meeting of a 20-member National ...

Ethnic Bunong villagers living in Mondolkiri province’s Pech Chreada district have sent a petition to the Ministry of Land Management, urging the government to refrain from issuing them private land titles, local officials said yesterday. This way they may instead to eligible for a communal title ...

The government has publicly issued lists showing the costs of fees that businesses must pay to authorities for various services, in an effort to help companies avoid making informal payments made illegal by the anticorruption law. The lists were drafted during the past year after Cambodia ...

Land prices in Cambodia continued to recover in the last half of 2012, especially in urban areas, following a collapse of the market in 2008, real estate investors say. Keuk Narin, vice president of Asia Real Estate Cambodia, told VOA Khmer that commercial land prices ...