The first class action lawsuit against a Thai firm for its actions in Cambodia is a test case for transboundary disputes

BANGKOK, July 31 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A Bangkok court on Friday agreed to grant class action status to more than 700 Cambodian families suing a Thai sugar firm for evicting them from their homes, a lawsuit that human rights experts see as a test case for transboundary disputes.

The Philippines was the deadliest country in Asia for land and environmental defenders again last year while slipping to second most dangerous in the world behind Colombia, a watchdog said Wednesday.

A total of 43 defenders were killed in the archipelago -- the vast majority on the fertile and resource-rich islands of Mindanao and Negros -- compared with 30 in 2018, Global Witness said in a report.

Edo State High court in Benin City, has commenced the hearing of a suit filled against the Iyatsere of Warri kingdom, Chief Johnson Atseleghe, seeking to stop him from parading himself as the traditional ruler of Ologbo dukedom and from selling lands that belongs to the dukedom.

The case which came up for hearing on yesterday under Justice Daniel Okungbowa, also seeks to restrain the defendant, Chief Atseleghe and his agent from carrying out actions that is capable of compromising the peace in Ologbo.

Global Witness campaigners warn of risk of further killings during Covid-19 lockdowns

Main photo: Celia Xakriaba, an indigenous educator and activist of the Xakriaba people of Brazil, with a portrait of Paulo Paulino Guajajara, who was killed in an ambush by illegal loggers in 2019. Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA

The second round of LAND-at-scale resulted in 24 ideas submitted by 19 Dutch embassies. The LAND-at-scale Committee selected 6 most promising ideas to develop further. 

LAND-at-scale is a government programme that contributes to improving land governance. The programme supports economic development, peace and stability in developing countries. It also contributes to sustainable incomes, social justice, and better food and nutrition security.

Main photo: land to be taken for the Vientiane Expressway in Laos is shown in a 2020 photo (RFA)

Residents of the Lao capital Vientiane are resisting seizure of their land by a Lao-China joint venture building an expressway, saying they had been promised earlier their land would not be taken, and calling offers of compensation unacceptably low, Lao sources say.

Main photo: Protesters call in Phnom Penh for government authorities to intervene in land-rights disputes, Jan. 13, 2020 (RFA).

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 Tuesday, as a rights group urged authorities to take action against all perpetrators of illegal land grabs equally.

Namgyal Durbuk knows the steep mountainous terrain of Ladakh like the back of his hand. But in the 45 years he has lived here, along the Indian state’s volatile and poorly defined border with neighbouring China, he has watched Indian land disappear before his eyes.

A war is brewing in Agudama-Epie community in Yenagoa Local Government Area, Bayelsa State, over moves by the Central Naval Command (CNC), Nigerian Navy, to demolish buildings around its headquarters, known as Camp Porbeni. Until 2013, Camp Porbeni was the cynosure of all eyes when entering Yenagoa because its alluring environment had been used by the Nigerian Army to accommodate its top officers and by Julius Berger as residential quarters for its management staff.

Peace-building nongovernment organization (NGO) International Alert Philippines (IAP) has expressed alarm over what it described as “raging conflicts” over land and natural resources in the Bangsamoro amid the Covid-19 pandemic in the last two months.

The group has been monitoring events in conflict areas, particularly Mindanao, through its critical events monitoring system (CEMS) bulletin.

A giant Vietnamese agribusiness company is destroying indigenous land in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province, said a joint press release from Equitable Cambodia and Inclusive Development International that was published on Monday.

The human rights groups wrote that many indigenous people in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province have been waiting for years for the Vietnamese rubber company, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), to finally return their sacred land, as had been promised by a 2015 mediation agreement.

Some 50 people representing more than 100 families locked in a land dispute in Kampong Thom province’s Kraya commune, in Santuk district, travelled to Phnom Penh to submit a petition at the National Assembly, the Prime Minister’s Cabinet and the Ministry of Interior on Monday and Tuesday.

The petitioners, who are also requesting intervention in the land dispute to acquire authorised land titles, accused provincial authorities of an attempt to jail them, but provincial governor Sok Lou denied this.