Civil Society (22nd – 26th September 2025)
| In Cambodia’s northeast province, indigenous communities are facing uncertainty over collective land ownership. As they struggle to secure long-awaited communal land titles (CLTs) inside protected forests, the government plans to build a military base which risks overlapping their ancestral reservation land. http://bit.ly/3IC4vjz; Nearly 300 families have fled to old displacement camps from the Cambodia-Thailand border in Preah Vihear province, officials said on Friday. The departures come amid fresh reports of gunfire and alleged troop buildups. http://bit.ly/4pGEgJs; Predatory lending and aggressive collection practices by microfinance institutions in Cambodia, backed by international investors, are driving land dispossession and human rights abuses among Indigenous communities, Indigenous borrowers described credit officers pressuring or coercing them to take out informal loans or sell land or assets to service their debt, sometimes through repeated visits and threats of legal action or involvement of local authorities. Many borrowers, who cannot read Khmer, said they did not fully understand loan repayment terms, fees, or interest rates before taking out the loans Human Rights Watch said in a new report. |
