62 In defense of land rights: A monitoring report on land conflicts in six Asian countries Land conflict report from RFA 2016-2018 In the period 2016 to 2018, Cambodia’s land conflicts were caused by the following: State-sponsored land-grabbing, private land-grabbing, land tenure, economic land concessions or hydroelectric development, evictions, urban development, government development projects, and finally the encroachment on community land. According to the data, State-owned private land-grabbing ranks most frequent cause, with 197 cases in 2016 and down to 59 cases in 2018. Private land-grabbing by powerful people is the second most frequent cause of conflict, with 125 cases in 2016 and 17 cases in 2018. Economic land concession investment is third, with 89 cases in 2016 and 76 cases in 2018. Most of the cases were caused by a failure to fully implement the law. Eviction from city development, mostly by private sectors in Phnom Penh and the Special Economic Zones, is fourth, with 22 cases in 2016, with only one case in 2018. The government’s railway development project caused conflicts only in 2016 and 2017, with 14 cases in each year. The disputes regarding community land accounted for 15 cases in 2017 and four more cases in 2018. The decreased number of cases in 2017 and 2018 can be traced to two factors. One, there were commune council elections in 2017 and national elections in 2018, and powerful people desisted from seizing land from the people for fear of electoral repercussions. But the main reason for the decrease in cases is that RFA has been suspended from collecting information in the targeted provinces. Land conflict report from the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction, 2016-2018 ANGOC This portion describes the conflict resolution performance of the Cadastral Commission of the Ministry of Land Management. It is based on reports from the land department from 2016 to 2018, and on the report of MLMUPC Minister H.E Mr. Chea Sophara, delivered during the Ministry’s 2017 annual meeting. The Minister reported that the total number of land disputes and related protests declined in 2017, and he claimed that this was because of the Ministry’s tireless efforts to manage land use with fairness and transparency. However, some NGOs claimed that activists were too afraid of arrests to raise their concerns.