Land Rights

Image credits When I heard Phnom Penh wasn’t a walking city, I bought a good pair of shoes. The evidence on my feet at the day’s end—after dodging motorbikes, piles of trash, street meat smoke, tuktuk offers—was par for the course.

Indigenous communities in Cambodia are legally recognized and should thus have been protected by the Land Law and the Forestry Law, entitling them to communal land titles. A number of national and international instruments including the Cambodian Land Law of 2001, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the ILO Convention no. 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples and the World Bank Safeguard Policy recognize both collective and individual Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

In February 2007, the Municipality of Phnom Penh granted a 99-year lease to the private developer Shukaku Inc. for 133 hectares of prime city-centre real estate in the capital’s Daun Penh district. The area included Boeung Kok lake, one of the few remaining natural lakes in the city, and home to some 20,000 people. Shukaku Inc. reportedly paid US$79 million for the land.

Boeung Kak used to be a beautiful lake in Phnom Penh. In 2007, the Cambodian government made an agreement with a company to lease the land to the company for 99 years. This agreement has resulted in the filling of the lake with sand in order for the company to build on the land. The Lake was 328 acres in size, which can support tens thousands of citizens if it is transformed to land. It seemed to be a reasonable sacrifice for the city in landscape.

  The “Everything but Arms” trade initiative should bring benefit to the poeple of Cambodia, but the opposite is the case. Illegal methods were established to make profits out of the duty-free export of sugar. Even though there is a EU resolution emphasizing the critical escalation of human rights abuses and land grabbing due to the export of agricultural products, the resulting efforts of the EU are poor.