News on Land

The Yogyakarta Indonesian Ombudsman (ORI Yogyakarta) says a 1975 Yogyakarta deputy gubernatorial instruction cannot be used as a legal basis for the State Land Agency (BPN) to reject the registration of land ownership status transfers requested by Chinese-Indonesians. 

“This is in line with a Supreme Court ruling issued in 2015 that declared the instruction invalid,” said Budhi Masthuri of ORI Yogyakarta on Monday.  

Colombia - Recognition of collective land tenure rights in Colombia is among the strongest in Latin America: there has been constitutional backing since 1991, and more than 30 million hectares of forests have already been designated as indigenous land. However, this legal protection often falls short of securing rights on the ground.

Gujarat, one of the fastest urbanising states in India, seems to be doing so against the wishes of its people

As you move west from the crowded old neighbourhoods of inner-city Ahmedabad, the roads broaden, buildings rise taller and BMWs line the streets. Old-timers here remember watching these wealthy, modern neighbourhoods engulf the countryside – the lush fields of wheat and corn that are now gone.

Those who live in villages on the city’s fringes today fear that the same will happen to them.

Lakshadweep and Meghalaya are the best among all 35 states and union territories of India at providing land rights to women, while Punjab and West Bengal are the worst, according to an index created by the Bhubaneswar-based Center for Land Governance, an arm of consultancy firm NR Management Consultants (NRMC).

Monday marks the anniversary of the clash in the Muthanga forest in 2003 that is considered the worst police action against the community in the state.

On Monday, Adivasis in Kerala observed the 15th anniversary of what is considered the worst police action against the community in the state’s history. On February 19, 2003, the police evicted hundreds of Adivasis who had occupied the Muthanga forest in Wayanad district to protest the delay in the government’s distribution of cultivable land that it had promised to all landless Adivasis in the state.

ORANG Asli from six kampung have formed several blockades in Gua Musang, Kelantan, this morning to protest against the logging activities in the forest reserve which encroach into their land.

Mohd Syafiq Dendi, chairman of the customary land territory in Pos Simpor, said the protesters have set up three blockades at Chawas, Tohoi and Kuala Wok early today.

“The blockades started this morning. This is against logging and commercial farming. 

“They are encroaching into Orang Asli territory. Stop the logging now,” he told The Malaysian Insight. 

Cases of double ownership of land are common in Kenya, where cartels collude with officials to create parallel titles for parcels want to acquire illegally

NAIROBI/ACCRA, Feb 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - On a recent Saturday afternoon, Joseph Njuguna received a worrying call. Without his permission, someone was excavating a small piece of land he had bought six years ago.

When he reached the site he found an excavator digging up soil, and two yellow Tata trucks waiting to ferry it away.

Successive plans excluded Delhi’s urban villages from civic control and virtually turned them into islands. Haphazard construction and unchecked commercialisation only added to the civic mess in these 135 localities spread across Delhi.

The sprawling fields in front of Sultan Chauhan’s 20-room house in Hauz Khas village doubled up as playground when he was a child. But today, the fields have been replaced by a congested row of buildings that has cropped up in the last three decades.

While Prime Minister Trudeau called for an end to colonial-era laws, First Nations leaders cautioned of “a lot of good words” from his government.

Canada will create a legal framework to guarantee the rights of Indigenous people in all government decisions, doing away with policies built to serve colonial interests, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday as Native leaders in the country continued to caution against his charm offensive and demanded actions rather than words.

Rangelands are land areas with indigenous vegetation, including grass and shrubs, and used as a natural ecosystem for grazing livestock and wildlife. Rangelands occupy nearly half of the world’s land surface and include more than a third of global biodiversity hotspots, as well as habitat for 28% of the world’s endangered species.

• For decades the Papua region in Indonesia has remained the country’s least-understood, least-developed and most-impoverished area, amid a lack of transparency fueled by a strong security presence.
• Activists hope their new website, Mata Papua, or Eye of Papua, will fill the information void with reports, data and maps about indigenous welfare and the proliferation of mines, logging leases and plantations in one of the world’s last great spans of tropical forest.

• Brazil’s Supreme Court has soundly rejected a lawsuit filed in 2003 by a right wing political party that would have drastically limit the ability of quilombolas (former slave communities) to legitimize claims to their traditional lands.
• There are 2,962 quilombolas in Brazil today, but just 219 have land titles, while 1,673 are pursuing the process of acquiring legal title. Titled quilombola territories include 767,596 hectares (1.9 million acres); these settlements have a good record of protecting their forests.