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Cambodia - Amnesty International Report 2008
Some 150,000 Cambodians were known to live at risk of losing their homes as land disputes and land grabbing proliferated. Forced evictions of poor communities continued and victims had limited access to legal redress. The ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) continued to consolidate power and maintained a grip over the judiciary, where deep-seated shortcomings remained largely unchanged. After considerable delays, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC, Khmer Rouge Tribunal) became operational; five arrests and the first hearing took place.
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Annual Activity Report
continued to face a campaign of threats, intimidation and groundless legal actions to pressure them to give up their land. Since 2005, the 7NG company has been laying claim to the prime riverside land of Dey Krahorm in central Phnom Penh, based on an invalid contract it signed secretly with former community representatives. Faced with the threat of eviction and continued harassment, many residents agreed to the companys offer of alternative land at a relocation site outside of Phnom Penh or cash payments of far below the market value of their land. Other residents, however, remain on the site, struggling to retain their land or at least to obtain fair, market-price compensation for it.
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Plantations in the Mekong Region: Overview WRM Briefing, December 2008
Eucalyptus, oil palm, rubber and jatropha monoculture plantations are expanding onto local communities’ lands and forests in the Mekong region’s countries. Promoted under the guise of development, poverty alleviation and even climate change mitigation, such plantations are resulting in severe social and environmental impacts. In spite of the difficult political scenarios in which they are established, local peoples are resisting through whichever means are available to them, ranging from broad alliances against plantations (such as inThailand) to nascent clusters of local resistance against plantations in Cambodia and Laos.
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Violent Kampot Eviction Should be Halted
LICADHO calls for the immediate suspension of an ongoing violent eviction led by Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) soldiers in Kampot province which has seen numerous homes burned down and at least three people injured by beatings.
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Civil Society Appeal for Urgent Solution to the Cambodian-Thai Border Dispute
We, representatives of Cambodian civil society, have grave concerns about the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute which has led to the fighting between the two countries, resulting in death and serious injury. This bloodshed is contrary to the principles of United Nation’s human rights conventions which both countries have ratified.
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Illegal Arrests and Social Affairs Centers: Time for Government Action, not More Denials
LICADHO deplores the government’s continued failure to take proper action to investigate and punish systematic abuses committed at the Prey Speu and Koh Kor Social Affairs Centers, and to ensure that such abuses cannot occur again.
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Respect for Housing, Land and Property Rights in Cambodia
In the countryside, home to approximately 85 per cent of the Cambodian population, landholdings are increasingly skewed, with hard-pressed subsistence farmers often forced to sell to urban speculators who hold large plots of arable land idle. Although rural land was relatively equitably distributed in the 1980s, landlessness subsequently mushroomed from in the late 1990s to in 2004. Meanwhile, programs meant to distribute land back to the rural poor have not been implemented. A prominent NGO, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, has seen land disputes rise to the human rights and social problem number one for rural Cambodians participating in its regular public forums.
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Courts Used as Weapon Against Community Representatives
The filing of criminal charges against nine community representatives from around Cambodia in the past week highlight the widespread misuse of the law against communities who try to defend themselves in land disputes, LICADHO said today.
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