Petition To Stop Evictions In Cambodia
Aug 6, 2008
Please sign the petition here...
ALJAZEERA
July 18, 2008
101 East asks if international aid is harming Cambodia more than it is helping.
View in our Media Room
Andong Memorial
June 6, 2008 (view .doc)
Children's Festival in Andong
June 1, 2008
Hip Hop Group
Happy Garden Center’s very own hip hop group also came together to develop a performance for International Children’s Rights Day. The group of eight (six boys and two girls) from Andong practiced every day leading up to the event and put on show for the entire audience.
Back ground
Two years after the unlawful eviction of Sambok Chap on June 6, 2006, over 1,000 families still live in squalid conditions in Andong without access to basic living standards, specifically drinking water, sanitation, housing, medical and access to education and income opportunities.
On March 18, 2008, Future Cambodia opened a centre on one hector of land for the children of Andong; a safe place to learn and grow together.
In April 2008, teams from Future Cambodia Fund, LICADHO Canada and LICADHO met to discuss and organize event activities with the children of Andong relocation site on International Children’s Day, June 1, 2008. As a result, it was decided to organize a Children’s Festival in Andong on June 1, the plans were as follows: more...
Country For Sale
April 26, 2008
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008Almost half of Cambodia has been sold to foreign speculators in the past 18 months - and hundreds of thousands who fled the Khmer Rouge are homeless once more. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report.
Sang Run, his hair stiff with sea salt, chugs out into the Gulf of Kompong Som in his weather-beaten turquoise boat, looking for blackling. He scours the shallow, blue water, waiting for a shoal to appear, before skimming his net across the water. He does the same every day, taking his catch to auction on Independence Beach in Cambodia's southern port city of Sihanoukville.
It looks like a scene Sang Run was born into. But 20 years ago the beach was deserted, and he was a schoolteacher in Mondulkiri, a forested province hundreds of miles away in the east of the country. Back then, he could talk all day about palm sugar and betel nuts. He was something of an amateur botanist, but had never seen the sea - nor had any of the group who today gather around his silvery haul flapping in the sand on Independence Beach. Former nurse Srey Pov, who runs a Khmer restaurant along the beach, also came from a province many miles away. She still cannot swim, she says, shrugging. Heads nod around her. Cambodia is a nation that would drown if their boat tipped over; it is also a country whose citizens mostly do not belong to the places where they have ended up. more...
Homes On The Front Line
The Phnom Penh Land Grab
Feb 27, 2008One of the only accurate articles written about Dey Krahorm land conflict and definately the most pages. LICADHO Canada met Peter Harris in Dey Karhorm during December. Peter was one of the journalists documenting the attacks on the community but he stood out in terms of his committment to paint the Dey Krahorm conflict in a truthful light.
This story was printed in SE ASIA GLOBE (pdf) magazine in February.
MORE VIOLENCE IN PHNOM PENH LAND CASES
Joint Media Statement
Feb 22 , 2008Cambodian and international human rights organizations are united in condemning two separate violent incidents, which have resulted in blood shed over land in Phnom Penh within the past 48 hours at the Reak Reay and Russey Keo communities. The Housing Rights Task Force (HRTF), NGO Forum on Cambodia , LICADHO, Community Legal Education Centre (CLEC), Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT) and Bridges Across Borders deplore these violent acts and call on the Royal Government of Cambodia to impose an immediate moratorium on evictions until effective legal protections are made available for persons affected by evictions.more...
Press release: Cambodia
Meeting of the Government-Donor Coordination Committee
Donors should hold the Cambodian
Government accountable for forced evictions !
Mar 04 , 2008On 4 March 2008, the Cambodian government and the community of donors for Cambodia will meet in order to discuss several issues of common concern, including land issues. The Government-Donor Coordination Committee is a mechanism established in 2004 to strengthen Government-Donor coordination to improve aid effectiveness.
"As stressed on the occasion of my recent visit in Cambodia, I call upon international donors to put pressure on Cambodian authorities to address the crucial issue of forced evictions as a priority. The message from the international community to the Cambodian authorities must be clear", said Souhayr Belhassen, President of FIDH.more...
Press Release: Cambodia Asian Human Rights Commission
Feb 05, 2008As the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has previously reported that several residents in Dey Krohorm were injured or are facing criminal lawsuits in order to stop attempts by them to prevent their forcible eviction by a company in connivance with the authorities (UA-271-2007 and UAU-002-2008), yet another woman was reported to have been injured in 29 January 2008. The government has produced a policy to evacuate them and it has so far failed to take any action to either assist or provide effective remedies to the residents.more...
Day 7 of the standoff
Dec 21, 2007It is amazing to be able to say that the village is still resisting after 6 days. No authorities have come to help. No courts have intervened. No editor really wants to print the story. No embassies are concerned. BUT, Dey Krahorm is resisting a powerful company, without appointed leaders and with mainly women and children. It’s incredible! Groups of men [and children as young as 14] torment, taunt, jeer and charge at them over and over and over. But the villagers continue to stand up and come up with unique ways to make their stance. more...
Cambodia: Leading Rights Groups Support UN Envoy
(Washington, DC, December 18, 2007)Five leading international human rights organizations today called upon the Cambodian government to respect its international human rights commitments as well as United Nations officials mandated to monitor them.. more...
Hun Sen Blasts Rights Envoy, Defends Burma
By Yn Samean
(December 13, 2007)The government willwrite to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon informing the world body that Cambodian authorities will never again work with UN rights envoy Yash Ghai, Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday.
Hun Sen said that Ghai and the UN had treated Cambodia badly, adding that the Cambodian government supported the military junta in Burma and would defend it at the UN Convention for Human Rights in Geneva next year.
"I will inform [Ban Ki-moon] that if you continue to use [Yash Ghai] Hun Sen will not work with him," the Primie MInister said.
Hun Sen said that Ghai, a Kenyan, was unfit to comment on conditions regarding human rights in Cambodia as his own country was in far worse condition.
"[Kenya] is one hundred times worse than us, so please develop your country first," Hun Sen said, adding that if Cambodia was not governed by the rule of law, as Ghai had said, the enjoy would not have been able to travel freely.
"If there was no law, how could you travel to the provinces?" Hun Sen asked.
....Reiterating Cambodia's support for the junta, Hun Sen said he would send Minister for Foreign Affairs Hor Namhong to defend Burma at the UN human rights convention in Geneva.
"Give the junta time to work," Hun Sen said, while claiming that some of the Buddhist monks who had led the recent demonstrations in Burma were charlatans.
Ghai wrapped up his 10-day mission to Cambodia on Monday with a news conference during which he expressed his deep concern over the government's handling of land issues and failure to reform the legal system.
The outspoken envoy also slammed Cambodia's international aid donor community for remaining silent in the face of a "deteriorating situation" in the country regarding land grabbing. Ghai said that international aid donors were "deeply implicated" in the actions of the government.
