Inclusive Development International, Equitable Cambodia and the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) issue a joint statement to the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights highlights a decade-long struggle by displaced Cambodian communities against Asia’s largest sugar company Mitr Pohl
The villagers say they never received compensation for farmland lost to a sugarcane company owned by a senator, another company owned by businessman Heng Huy, and to Chinese company the Union Development Group.
Over the past two decades, Cambodia’s land leasing policy has led to more than a tenth of the country’s land area being leased and has become increasingly controversial because of its negative impact on local livelihoods.
An analysis of the global impact of a Thai court judgement, which provides a judicial forum to farmers from Cambodia, who were victims of transnational land grabbing.
On 10 August 2020 indigenous communities from Busra commune in Cambodia signed an agreement with the rubber company Socfin Cambodia to settle a long-lasting dispute about their communal and spiritual lands.
A Bangkok court ruled that about 3,000 Cambodians could proceed with a class-action suit against Mitr Phol, the world’s fourth-largest sugar producer. Farmers in Oddar Meanchey province are seeking compensation after the Cambodian government allocated land to the company for sugar plantations.
Le tribunal civil de Bangkok a accordé à plus de 700 familles cambodgiennes le droit de se joindre à une action collective contre Mitr Phol, le plus grand producteur de sucre de Thaïlande, dont les activités au Cambodge ont conduit à l’expulsion forcée de familles en 2008 et 2009.
Today, Cambodian plaintiffs representing more than 700 farming families won a landmark appeal allowing them to move forward with their class action against Asia’s largest sugar producer, Mitr Phol. The transboundary class action Hoy Mai & Others vs. Mitr Phol Co. Ltd. is the first of its kind in Southeast Asia.
On 17 July 2020, Amnesty International submitted a third-party legal intervention (amicus curiae brief)to Bangkok South Civil Court that grant Class Action Lawsuit (CAL) status to more than 700 Cambodian families who are suing Thai sugar giant Mitr Phol after being forcibly evicted from their homes in 2008-09.
The Preah Vihear Provincial Court in Cambodia has dropped all charges against eight ethnic Kuoy villagers who were in a land dispute with the Hengfu Group Sugar Industry Co Ltd since 2014.
Cambodia’s government is unable to resolve the country’s myriad land disputes because many of them involve senior officials, Minister of Interior Sar Kheng said in a rare acknowledgement
People's Coalition on Food Sovereignty, GRAIN, and Ponlok Khmer urged the government of Cambodia to return disputed land from Chinese company Hengfu Group Sugar Industry to the Khmer and Indigenous Kuy communities. The groups expressed solidarity with the Indigenous Kuy people who continue to assert their legitimate land rights even amid the global health crisis.
