Land Titling in Cambodia: Formalizing Inequality

Illegal land grabbing by powerful actors is unexceptional in Cambodia, where forced evictions and confiscation of land rank among the country’s most pervasive human rights problems. Since 1990 approximately eleven percent of the population of Phnom Penh has been forcibly evicted and relocated to peri-urban resettlement sites that often lack housing, basic infrastructure, and access to public services and and granted as “economic land concessions” to Cambodian and foreign investors without regard for the rights of affected rural and indigenous communities. As a result, these communities have suffered widespread displacement, dispossession of their farming and grazing lands, and reduced access to the forests that sustain their livelihoods.