(July 31, 2020) – 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.  It was filed under Thai laws permitting a class action to be brought by foreign plaintiffs for abuses committed by a Thai company overseas.

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.

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

A research report released by four civil society organisations on Monday warns that development in the Boeung Tompun lake puts 1.2 million Phnom Penh residents, or half the city’s population, in danger of floods.

One thousand families are at risk of eviction, loss of income and food insecurity from unsustainable private development, said the human rights groups report – Smoke on the water: A human rights and social impact assessment of the destruction of the Boeung Tompun/Cheung Ek wetlands.

‘WOLTS Team Perspectives’ is a new series of blogs launched in February 2020 by the global WOLTS team. In this series, field team members share their views about the impacts of the project’s action-research on gender, land and mining among pastoralist communities in Tanzania and Mongolia.

he successful integration of a number of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been driven by cooperation with large-scale miners (LSMs), refiners, traders and the embedding of traceability measures, says natural resource transformation nongovernmental and nonprofit organisation IMPACT.

A review by an anti-fraud taskforce has revealed massive corruption in the DRC involving employees of the UN and international NGOs. Lack of oversight on how aid to the DRC’s vulnerable populations is dispersed has allowed bribery to flourish in one of the world’s most mineral-rich and conflict-prone countries.

The Preah Vihear Provincial Court 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.

Wednesday’s decision was made by the judge who tried the case on June 10. The eight were accused of detention and illegal confinement.

Defence lawyer Sam Tithseyha told The Post on Thursday it was the right decision because they are the victims and this decision shows their innocence as they are not guilty of the charges and have good names in society.

• Lawmakers in Indonesia want to question pulp and paper company PT Arara Abadi about its dispute with an Indigenous community in Sumatra that resulted in a member of the community being jailed on dubious charges.
• The company has held the concession to the land since 1996, but the Sakai Indigenous tribe have lived and farmed there since 1830, and claim ancestral rights to the area.

• Sierra Leone is among the poorest countries in the world. In the 1990s, when other African countries were privatizing key industries in order to attract foreign investment and become eligible for international loans, a civil war was raging in Sierra Leone that prevented the country from taking part in the controversial structural adjustment programs initiated by the World Bank and the Inter-national Monetary Fund.

• Mbonjo sits in the heart of Cameroon’s country’s largest oil palm and rubber-producing region. In 2000, state-owned oil palm plantations around the village were acquired by Société Financière des Caoutchoucs (Socfin), a Belgian holding company that operates palm oil and rubber plantations through dozens of subsidiaries across Africa and Southeast Asia.

…says women most affected over non-inclusiveness

Environmental Right Action/ Friends of the Earth, ERA/FoEN have asserted that the incident of land grabbing and deforestation was becoming increasingly alarming in various Cross River communities.