About 200 villagers from Phnom Penh’s Meanchey district who are involved in a long-running land dispute with two businessmen gathered outside the Court of Appeal on Tuesday, waiting to hear the verdict in their case—which was ultimately delayed.
The villagers are representatives of 320 families in Stung Meanchey commune that have been in dispute with Ta Vorak Satha and Ta Ratha Phirum, the father-and-son owners of Beta International Ltd., since 1998, when the Phnom Penh Municipal Court awarded more than 17 hectares of disputed land to the firm.
In the courtroom Tuesday, Neang Hay, a lawyer representing the two men, said that his clients legally bought the land in 1991 from 39 families living there, and had planned to construct a horseracing track but have been unable to do so since the families have refused to move.
“I request that the judges reject the conclusions of the villagers’ two lawyers and recognize my clients’ right to occupy this land,” Mr. Hay said.
But the lawyers representing the families, Yong Phanith and Oum Bunthoeun, argued that the 39 had been tricked into the deal and that some of their clients had been living on the land since the end of the Khmer Rouge regime.
“The company claims that they bought the land from 39 families, but it is not true,” Mr. Phanith said, adding that the case was made even clearer by the fact that the Ministry of Land Management recently gave land titles to more than 40 of the 320 families.
Further complicating the case, a pagoda was built on the land in 1997 and its clergy have sided with the villagers. Soeun Daing, a representative from the pagoda, said that his wife had bought the 5,360 square meters of land it is built on from the state.
“So we have enough documents regarding the land on which the pagoda is built,” Mr. Daing said.
However, presiding Judge Leang Meang said he was delaying the verdict because both sides needed to present more evidence before he could rule.
Since the 1998 municipal court verdict, the case has been to the Appeal Court, which in 2000 ruled in the company’s favor, and to the Supreme Court in 2011, which sent it back to the Appeal Court.
