Rights groups demand release of eviction protesters in Cambodia

Jan 12, 2012
DPA

Phnom Penh - Cambodian authorities must release 24 women and six children detained after they participated in eviction protests, a coalition of rights groups said Thursday.

The women and children were among hundreds whose homes were demolished in a violent eviction January 3 in central Phnom Penh.

They were arrested Wednesday outside the municipal hall while protesting their eviction and calling for the authorities to release eight other jailed residents.

Naly Pilorge, the director of the rights group LICADHO, said the Prey Speu centre in Phnom Penh, where the women and children were being held, had a long history of abuses, including rapes, beatings, illegal confinement, deaths and torture.

'For the authorities to illegally detain anyone, especially children, into a centre with such a clearly established track record of abuses is deeply troubling,' she said, adding that the arrests ought to serve as 'a wake-up call' to Cambodia's international donors.

Government spokesmen were unavailable for comment.

About 100 police clashed last week with residents of the Borei Keila site as they evicted hundreds of families and bulldozed their homes to make way for a 12-hectare development where offices, apartments and the Tourism Ministry is to be built.

Twelve people were injured, most of them civilians, and eight residents were arrested.

Most of the evictees were then trucked 45 kilometres out of town and left at a dusty field that lacked facilities.

The families had been living on land owned by a development firm and awaiting relocation into new apartment blocks as had been agreed when the company bought the land in 2003. But after building eight of the agreed 10 blocks, the company refused to build the remaining two, which would have housed the evicted 350 families.

Tensions between residents, authorities and companies in Phnom Penh over land use have increased in recent years because of an upswing in large-scale development projects.

The country's land-titling system is weak after the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime abolished property rights. Foreign-sponsored programmes to reinstate title deeds have met with limited success amid accusations of corruption.