Blog | March 16, 2021
Policy and Practice: Does the International Criminal Court have the will to prosecute environmental crimes?
Global Witness
Patrick Alley
In 1995, on Global Witness’s first-ever investigation, I stood looking at the 11th-century Khmer temple at Preah Vihear, perched on top of the steep jungle-clad escarpment which marked the border, where Thailand’s Dângrêk Mountain range plunged 800 metres down into the Cambodian plain.

Dominating the territory to the south, east and west, the temple and its Khmer Rouge occupants looked out across a seemingly endless sea of rainforest that filled the horizon under a vast azure sky. It was absolutely breathtaking.

We were there to investigate the Khmer Rouge’s trade in timber with Thailand, which was filling the rebels’ war-chest to the tune of US$10-20 million per month. It’s almost unbelievable to me that in the intervening 25 years, that rainforest has almost entirely disappeared. But whilst the Khmer Rouge inflicted some damage to the forests, it was the subsequent (and current) dictatorship that sealed their fate.

In their years of power the world looked on in horror as the Khmer Rouge killed between 1.2-2.8 million people, up to 30% of Cambodia’s population in the biggest genocide since the Nazi Holocaust, immortalised in the Hollywood film The Killing Fields. Sadly, the peace that followed the 1991 Paris Peace Accords and the United Nations’ peacekeeping intervention, gave way to a violent autocratic kleptocracy that exists to this day.

Timber Barons

Violent, criminal and politically well-connected timber barons close to Cambodia’s extraordinarily corrupt government paid for licenses to log the forests; they were followed by other cronies who set up ‘economic land concessions’ to plant commodities like rubber. By 2015, NASA reported that Cambodia had one of the fastest deforestation rates on the planet - between 2001-2019, Cambodia lost over 2 million hectares.

Global Witness and others documented the Cambodian government’s land grabbing frenzy and human rights abuses for over two decades. Hundreds of thousands of poor Cambodians have been illegally and violently displaced from their land. Half the 190,000 minority indigenous people had lost their ancestral land and, with it, their way of life. Those who resist have been beaten, murdered, or arrested on trumped-up charges. Entire villages have been burnt to the ground. The Cambodian genocide was undoubtedly a crime against humanity, and so is this.

Complaint filed with the ICC

In 2014 Global Diligence, led by international criminal lawyer Richard J Rogers, used data gathered by Global Witness to file a complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC) that has the potential to make history: that crimes associated with mass land grabbing can amount to crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute.

The complaint hit home. In 2016 the ICC Prosecutor issued a policy on case selection - for the first time in history, an international criminal court would prioritise crimes within its jurisdiction that are committed by means of or result in “the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources, or the illegal dispossession of land.” The Cambodian case fitted perfectly.

Many believed that this policy was a recognition by the ICC Prosecutor that she too understood how the escalating climate crisis and the insatiable scramble for natural resources were resulting in mass human rights abuses. And how putting the brakes on illegal land grabbing would help protect the environment and combat climate change.

But the Cambodia complaint continues to languish in the ICC’s case file in a sort of cryogenic sleep: the Court has not taken action to prosecute this or any other case, that chimes with the new policy to tackle environmental destruction. This has to change.
In full: https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/p ... al-crimes/

‘What other country would do this to its people?’ Cambodian land grab victims seek int’l justice
by Gerald Flynn, Phoung Vantha on 1 April 2021

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in 2014 estimated that at least 770,000 people had been affected by land grabs that cover some 4 million hectares of land. Sources say Indigenous communities are more adversely affected by land grabs because the land is often central to their animist beliefs and their livelihoods, and they are even less likely to be afforded justice than ethnically Khmer victims.

FIDH, along with Global Witness and Climate Counsel, submitted an open letter dated March 16 to Fatou Bensouda, the current prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging her to open a preliminary examination into land-grabbing in Cambodia.

International lawyer Philippe Sands and Florence Mumba – a judge at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia – announced they were drafting a definition of ecocide to be included on the list of international crimes that includes such atrocities as genocide and crimes against humanity. Their definition is expected early this year and could mean perpetrators of environmental destruction could be brought to international justice.

As recently as June last year, the World Bank announced another $93 million would go to fund the third phase of its land tenure project in Cambodia, despite mounting allegations of abuse within the system that has led critics to accuse the World Bank of being complicit in land grabbing and the environmental damage it has caused.

“It started when some people from the government came around the community telling us that we were illegally occupying the land,” Chhae Kimsrour said in June 2020. “I’ve lived here since 1995, but six months later they came back and started filling in my lake. They said it was their land now – many families in the area have been affected.”

At the time, Kimsrour was raising fish and crocodiles in Beoung Samrong, a small community on the northwestern outskirts of Phnom Penh. Living with three generations under one roof, he said his aquaculture enterprises were sustaining his family – until the government filled in two of his three lakes, claiming that the land was in fact state-public land that the authorities were requisitioning, reportedly to build a park.

“They built a road right through my property, everything I own, I earned through sweat and blood – what other country would do this to its people?” said a visibly distraught Kimsrour.

In March 2021 Kimsrour confirmed that, despite going through the bureaucratic administrative processes set out by the Municipal Department of Land Management, he has now lost over a hectare of his land and was unable to afford a lawyer.

“The government has been promising compensation since last year [2020] but I’ve had nothing. When is it coming? That land was mine for decades” he said.

Meanwhile, in July 2020 Touch Soeun awoke each morning in fear that the bulldozers would return. The month prior, a fleet of bulldozers flanked by local authorities and police officers arrived to inform him that the Boeung Chhouk A village – a small hamlet in northern Phnom Penh – was illegally occupying land that was owned by an unnamed property developer.

By that time, six houses had been torn down and one homeowner had had a heart attack as the bulldozers tore through his home, according to Soeun.

“I’ve still not heard back from the complaint I submitted to City Hall last month [June 2020], but I don’t know what will happen if they [the bulldozers] return,” he said in July. “The community is united. We’re prepared to stop the authorities from taking our homes.”

But now Soeun said that the remaining 22 families of Boeung Chhouk A live in limbo. As of March 2021, his community’s case has not moved forwards and the authorities maintain they are illegally occupying the land, but would be compensated if they left.

“We’re living as normal now; it’s been nine months since they first tore down houses. We don’t know what is happening, but we don’t want to leave,” he said in March 2021.
Full article: https://news.mongabay.com/2021/04/what- ... l-justice/

Sad but it's going to take a revolution to change

Six houses? 22 people? This is nothing compared to what they have done in Siem Reap with hundreds of houses demolished at the owners expense, no compensation, and thousands of people forced out of their houses. Not a peep of protest. The International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction unless the government agrees - which will not happen.

Well that's true but I don't really invisage any protests here being any less messy then the ones in burma so people have to get pretty peed off before they will resort to that. I think these things are being noted by the UN and other groups and while they may be powerless the evidence might be useful in the future.
On another unrelated note dictatorships are inherently unstable

fsdfdsdf wrote:Sad but it's going to take a revolution to change

Khmer history is about rulers. Cambodians never went through the Age of Enlightenment, or the Religious Wars that Europe went through. Might makes right. Period.

The high point was the Angkor Empire. After that, endless royal family squabbles, being used by both the Thai and the Vietnamese, all in a grab for power. And keeping it. Currently Iron Man holds power and making sure nothing challenges that power.

Nothing will happen.

Revolution and people power is not a native Khmer idea.

That’s my opinion.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

newkidontheblock wrote: ↑Sun Apr 04, 2021 12:49 am
Revolution and people power is not a native Khmer idea.

Of course not. Just check your history books.

John Bingham wrote:I find Taiwan/ Formosa to be much more progressive.

Thanks! After the loss of an entire country in 1949, the Nationalists became a lot of introspective. Massive corruption that led to warlordism was eliminated, and major land reforms instituted. It was still a long road. Democracy didn’t happen until 1990.

Taiwan is still a fledgling democracy struggling for world recognition.