Livelihood rights

Just a few days into her fifth visit and the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar has already encountered a few bumps in the road, with the government blocking her from going to Laiza and Hpakant, in Kachin State. Yanghee Lee and her ...

On a recent afternoon, the beach at Jatetaw village was bustling with fishermen hauling their boats a shore and off loading the catch. Local women carried the fish off in bamboo baskets and laid them out to dry in the sun, after which they would ...

Sitting on the edge of the dock, 68-year-old Vichay angrily pointed to three crumpled sheets of paper as he shuffled them around in his right hand. These wrinkled pages, he said, were the last remnants of evidence proving he owned the 15 hectares of land ...

Palm oil production in Indonesia often comes at the expense of traditionally managed lands as well as the livelihoods of indigenous communities, causing widespread conflict in the archipelago country. With oil palm cultivation set to double in Indonesia over the next 10 years, methods for understanding ...

Malaysia said on December 19 the plight of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar was a regional concern and called for the Association of South East Asian Nations to coordinate humanitarian aid and investigate alleged atrocities committed against them. Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman was speaking at a ...

Myanmar’s military clearance operations in northern Rakhine State are being carried out “lawfully”, the investigation commission led by Vice President Myint Swe concluded after wrapping up a three-day field visit to Maundgaw. The announcement comes as Human Rights Watch released a report accusing the military ...

As construction on the Don Sahong dam near the Cambodia-Laos border passes its halfway point, activists and locals are increasingly concerned over the disappearance of Irawaddy dolphins and incidences of illness they suspect are caused by the muddied water. “The waters downstream in Cambodia have ...

Laos needs to rethink its aggressive hydropower plans as new markets and technologies create an opportunity to change course. A report published in September by the Stimson Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, challenges prevailing notions about the future of hydropower in the Mekong subregion, an ...

Cambodia will support the Don Sahong hydroelectric dam planned to be built in south Laos less than two kilometers from the Cambodian border, while civil society groups continue to appeal to regional authorities to halt construction on environmental grounds. According to a post on Prime ...

 Several factors are disrupting the terrain for investment in large hydropower dams, and governments should take note. The government of Laos officially submitted the Pak Beng Dam to the Mekong River Commission in mid-November and has begun preparatory work around the future dam site. While ...