In defense of land rights: A monitoring report on land conflicts in six Asian countries 28 In Bangladesh, land in general is the source of almost 60 percent of all legal disputes (TIB, 2015). In the Chittagong Hill Tracts which is the principal home of the country’s indigenous people with a separate legal regime, some 30,000 applications are still pending with the CHT Land Dispute Resolution Commission. In Nepal, nearly 25,000 land-related cases are filed in court each year, based on data for 2012 to 2016, although the numbers are gradually decreasing. In Cambodia, an estimated 400,000 to a million people are said to have been affected by land disputes. ADHOC, a Cambodian human rights group, estimates that some 60,000 people have been forcibly evicted from their homes. Many land conflict cases lead to violence. Physical violence is most visible. In Bangladesh, a BRAC study estimates that 7.5 percent of households with past or present land conflict have experienced a physical assault (as cited in CDA, 2018). In the Philippines, 80 cases (23 percent of the total cases) had resulted in the killing of a stakeholder, of which 70 cases had the involvement of armed groups such as the military, paramilitary, and private armed groups. In Indonesia, agrarian conflicts are frequently followed by violent acts by the State security apparatus or by company guards against people who refuse to be evicted. Over a 20-month period, 22 people were killed and 318 people were injured, including 67 women. In all countries, it has been observed that women tend to be particularly active in land disputes, as they involve potential threats to homes, families and livelihoods. Other forms of physical violence include forcible eviction, destruction and burning of homes, looting of property, and human disappearances. The Kapaeeng Foundation’s annual Human Rights Report on Indigenous Peoples in Bangladesh showed that 1,484 houses of indigenous people were burned down, 206 houses were looted and ransacked, 146 people were assaulted/ injured, 9 killed and 40 women were raped or were victims of attempted rape – as a consequence of land disputes from 2015 to June 2018. ANGOC Over the same period, some 1,544 indigenous families in Bangladesh were forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands, with an equal number under threat of land grabbing. Some 771 indigenous people were facing false cases, while 39 others were arrested. Similarly, there have also been cases of people imprisoned by the police and military in other countries. In Indonesia, protesting communities have been criminalized – imprisoned and charged for civil and criminal acts. Some 369 people were arrested in 2017, and 152 people in the first eight months of