Land and housing rights and evictions

The managers of some of Cambodia’s most controversial agribusiness plantations on 21 July blamed their many land disputes on the government, accusing officials of failing to educate communities about the benefits of their giant farms. Rights groups blame economic land concessions for some of Cambodia’s worst problems, ...

An anti-eviction protester who police claim orchestrated several large-scale reoccupation attempts on a planned rubber plantation in Mondolkiri province was arrested on 11 July, police and a rights monitor said. About 500 families living on the land were evicted in 2012, three years after the Pacific ...

Suicide rates and poverty are on the rise among rice farmers displaced by Myanmar’s Paunglaung Dam. The change of government is expected to spur foreign investment into the country, contributing to its rapid development. But among the myriad issues facing the country, including  decades-long civil wars, the ...

The Nam Tha, or Tha River, begins in northern Laos near the Lao-China border and runs southwest to join the Mekong just south of Huay Xay on the Lao-Thai border. In October 2014, I traveled by motorcycle and longtail boat up the Nam Tha, starting ...

In 2010, more than 1,500 families in Kampong Speu’s Oral district were evicted from the land they had cultivated since the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 to make way for a Phnom Penh Sugar Company mega-plantation. Bunsak, head of the Cambodian Human Rights ...

Some 40 residents of Kachin State’s Myitkyina Township staged a protest on on 4 June against a meeting between Chinese Ambassador Hong Liang, Chinese investor China Power Investment and president of the Kachin State Democracy Party Tu Ja over attempts to renegotiate the Chinese-funded Myitsone dam.Keep ...

Newly appointed Minister of Land Management Chea Sophara last week established a working group comprising 27 four-man teams tasked with hastening the resolution of land disputes. According to a letter issued by the Ministry of Land Management on 5 June, each team will be assigned three ...

Some 100 people from five villages in Oddar Meanchey’s Chongkal district, Cambodia protested over the weekend against a hydropower dam project built by Chinese firm Sinohydro, claiming they have yet to be compensated for their eventual displacement when the flood gates close in the next ...

The Yangon divisional government plans to relocate squatters and provide them with temporary housing, said Yangon Chief Minister Phyo Min Thein on 25 May at a press conference. He warned against trespassing and living on vacant, private or government land from 25 May onward, and said that people ...

In response to protests outside the site of a controversial, re-launched copper mine, the company behind the project released a statement ridiculing the demonstration as representing a reckless minority. Residents are calling on the government to intervene, and have said the mine should not be allowed ...