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	Untangling land rights in rapidly-changing Myanmar by International Land Coalition, Namati, agencies   Feb 2015   The abuse of land rights has been one of the central injustices in Myanmar over the last half-century.   But now, across seven states and divisions, thirty community paralegals, supported by Namati and the Pyay-based Civil and Political Rights Campaign Group, are working with thousands of farmers to protect their land rights.   The paralegals track data on every case they handle, so they can identify opportunities for improving the system as a whole. Using the data to advocate that Myanmar"s new land policy should respect the rights of women as well as those whose land has been grabbed in the past.   Phoe Sein is a land rights advocate working in the dry and dusty central plains region of Bago in Myanmar. In 1996, Phoe Sein lost five of his family’s ten acres when a military officer marched into his field with a pistol and informed him that he was “trespassing on government land”. At the time, under the military rule of Than Shwe, says Phoe Sein, “Everyone was afraid. So government took land very easily.”   Phoe Sein’s land – five acres on the west side of Shan Su Village was part of a 5,291acre swath that the military seized, leasing the land to Burmese sugarcane companies. When Phoe Sein protested that the land belonged to him, the officer raised his pistol. He gathered his tools and walked back home.   The company came in with machines and cleared the land. Some local farmers became day laborers on the sugarcane farms. As years went by, the farmers fell into debt because of their shrunken farms. Children in the village had to drop out of school after year five, because the cost of school was out of reach.   It is a story that has been repeated cross in Myanmar. The military seizes land and signs deals with Burmese and foreign companies, leaving farmers impoverished or landless.   With elections and a change of government in 2011, there has been hope for change in Myanmar and the government recently released a draft national land use policy, which will be finalized at the start of 2015. However there are fears it will fail to address historic land grabbing by the country’s ruling elite, threatens to dispossess women and will leave thousands of farmers with insecure rights to their land.   Land in Myanmar is complex and important – over 65 per cent of the country works in agriculture. Recent government reforms have opened the door to protest and the claiming of redress, but not all of the trouble dates from military land grabs.   In Lad Panpin Village, in Bago, I talked to Nyo Gyi, a 43 year-old farmer whose main crops are beans and rice. In 2012 he learned that he was no longer eligible for the annual six-month loan from the Government Agricultural Bank that he and his family had depended on for as long as they could remember.   He was denied the loan because the government’s records classified his farm as state forest. Looking at the land, it is hard to understand how it could be classified as forest. The acres surrounding the village stretch out under the bleaching sun, dry and flat – barely a tree in sight. “We’ve been farming there for many years,” Nyo Gyi says. “Even in the ‘forest area’ there are no trees.”   Without government loans, farmers are forced to pay high interest rates to buy seeds. In 2013, Nyo Gyi’s yield was worse than expected because of drought, so he couldn’t pay his loan in full. Without being able to pay, and with high interest rates, Nyo Gyi is at risk of entering a crippling cycle of debt. Many farmers are experiencing the same problem.   The classification issue reveals how tenuous the farmers’ claims to their own land really are in Myanamr. Nyo Gyi was under the impression that he controlled the land he farmed. It was only when the land was designated a state forest that he realized this wasn’t true.   A new registration process, announced in 2012, has revealed the tangled web of confusion around ownership, control, classification, and use. The process lends itself to abuse. In one village, I talked to 26 year-old Thar Hla whose aunt, when she learned about the registration process, tried to register her nephew’s land under her name.   Without a land use certificate a farmer has no formal tenure and no ability to protect his land or his family’s livelihood, regardless of how long it has been understood to be theirs.   Meanwhile Myanmar’s opening up means the tourism industry is growing. Near Inle Lake, we passed happy tourists riding bicycles down a lazy road amidst new construction and bungalows enveloped in greenery. Across the street from a new flower-laden boutique hotel is Milethong village, a community that is seriously struggling.   Many of the farmers in Milethong lost access to their land because it has been seized by government and leased to developers to build hotels. Many Junta cronies own tourism businesses in the area.   “Problems have been there for a long time – but now because of the changes, farmers can do something. That’s why we hear their voice,” says Nay Tun, founder of the Civil and Political Rights Campaign Group (CPRCG). CPRCG was founded by a couple of activists in their late twenties. It employs lawyers, activists, and now works in partnership with Namati, an international legal empowerment organization, there are 30 paralegals like Phoe Sein across six of Myanmar’s 14 states and divisions.   Since the passage of the Farmland Law in 2012, over 300,000 acres across the country have been restored to farmers. Many with the assistance of paralegals trained by Namati and CPRCG.   But a great many past land grabs remain unsolved. “With the prevalence of past land injustices, some of which are decades-old cases, the new land policy shouldn’t just regulate future land use,” says Laura Goodwin, Namati’s program director in Myanmar. She is also concerned that because current land regulations only allow one name on a land use certificate women face the threat of dispossession.   “We’ve seen that 83 per cent of registrations are in a man’s name, despite the fact that many women hold documents like tax records showing the land they maintained in the past,” says Goodwin. “There also needs to be recognition of community land rights – shared commons areas that millions rely on for livestock grazing, firewood, and other resources.”   By collecting information on the thousands of land cases handled, Namati and CPRCG have more data on the land registration process than the government itself. It is using that information to advocate changes that will make the process more equitable for women and responsive to the outstanding land grabbing cases from the past.   “The Burmese government created five drafts of the National Land Use Policy this year before making a draft public,” says Goodwin. “Without a longer period for public consultation Myanmar’s land laws are in danger of making permanent the injustices of the past and creating new ones for the future.”   * In order to protect their identities, the names of some farmers were changed in this article.   http://namati.org/freedoms-and-threats/ http://namati.org/news/category/post-2015-sdgs/ http://namati.org/news/justice2015goal16impact/ http://www.landesa.org/securing-land-rights-must-be-key-in-un-development-talks/ http://www.landcoalition.org/en/news/organizations-call-inclusion-community-land-rights-un%E2%80%99s-post-2015-sustainable-development http://www.landcoalition.org/node/2581 http://www.gltn.net/index.php/projects/global-land-indicator-initiative http://conference.unitar.org/yale2014/sites/conference.unitar.org.yale2014/files/2014%20UNITAR-Yale%20Conference-Brinkhurst%20and%20Knight.pdf   * In January 2015, officers from the Fordham Law School - Leitner Center for International Law and Justice and the Global Justice Center undertook training workshops with representatives of 14 Civil Society groups in Burma to assist them in reporting to the upcoming Universal Periodic Review to the UN Human Rights Council - to harness and use international law to advance gender equality and to realize greater respect for human rights: http://globaljusticecenter.net/index.php/our-work/geneva-initiative/burma/gjc-in-burma-january-2015/burma-trainings-january-2015 Visit the related web page
	No Hope in Sight for Latin America’s Prison Crisis by Marianela Jarroud Inter Press Service   SANTIAGO, Feb 2 2015 (IPS)   In Latin America’s prisons, notorious for extreme overcrowding and violence, inmates live in constant danger of being killed – a contradiction in a region where virtually every country has abolished the death penalty.   “In many Latin American countries, a prison sentence can become a death sentence in practice,” said Amerigo Incalcaterra, regional representative for South America of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).   The abolition of capital punishment has a long tradition in this region. Venezuela was the first country in the world to do away with the death penalty, in 1863, and Costa Rica was the third country to do so, in 1882. Only two countries in the region still have the death penalty on their books: Cuba and Guatemala, where the last recorded executions were carried out in 2003 and 2000, respectively.   But the progress made on that front stands in sharp contrast with the appalling conditions in Latin America’s prisons, where human rights organisations and experts warn that the situation is grave.   High levels of violence, numerous murders and other crimes inside the prison walls, and serious human rights abuses are some of the problems in penitentiaries in the region, they report.   “In Latin America the prison systems face chronic problems which have not been adequately addressed, let alone resolved, by governments,” Incalcaterra said in an interview with IPS.   Olga Espinoza, the head of the area of penitentiary studies in the University of Chile’s Centre for Citizen Security Studies, also said the region’s prison systems are in a state of crisis.   “The latest report by the United Nations Development Programme provides very concrete data on the conditions of overpopulation and overcrowding, disproportionate numbers of inmates in preventive custody, fragile institutions in many countries, and difficulties in the effective implementation of social reinsertion programmes,” Espinoza told IPS.   One of the worst cases is Venezuela, where prison violence is extreme, with clashes involving firearms, explosives and other weapons, experts note.   In Venezuela, with a total prison population of 53,000, the authorities reported to the OHCHR that 402 inmates were killed in the first 11 months of 2014. The U.N. agency reports that overpopulation in the country’s prisons stands at 231 percent, although the government argues that there is no overcrowding in 87 percent of the prisons.   In the case of Brazil, human rights groups report cruel, inhumane and degrading conditions in the prisons, and there are numerous reports of torture, such as practices like asphyxiation with plastic bags, beatings and electric shocks.   Members of the military police are involved in the majority of cases, they say.   “However, Venezuela and Brazil are not isolated cases, but form part of a generalised pattern in the region,” Incalcaterra said.   “Certainly, both countries are facing serious challenges of prison violence and lack of state control in certain cases, as reported by several independent United Nations mechanisms,” he said.   “But no country in the region is free of the problems of overcrowding, precarious detention conditions, lack of access to basic services, and cases of mistreatment and torture,” he added.   The chronic problems facing the region’s penitentiary systems include severe overcrowding due to the systematic use of prison sentencing rather than alternative measures, and a lack of adequate infrastructure, Incalcaterra said.   To that is added “the lack of access to basic health services and adequate food, and general prison conditions that do not meet minimal international standards,” the OHCHR representative said.   “This situation fuels prison violence, including cases of torture, and directly affects the integrity and dignity of people deprived of freedom,” he said.   According to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, there were 943,000 people in prison in the region in 2013, 354,000 of whom were in preventive detention, awaiting trial or sentencing.   The most critical cases were those of Bolivia, where 84 percent of the prison population has not yet been sentenced, followed by Paraguay (73.1 percent), Panama and Uruguay (65 percent), Peru (58.8 percent), Venezuela (50.3 percent) and Guatemala (50.3 percent).   As a result, tragedies happen, such as the one that occurred on Dec. 8, 2010 in Chile, the worst in the history of the country’s prisons. In the fire, 81 inmates died, most of whom were first-time offenders in prison for minor crimes.   The San Miguel prison had at the time a population of 1,875 and a capacity for just 632 prisoners, which meant overpopulation of 197 percent.   Chile is the country with the highest incarceration rate in Latin America, with 318 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to the Latin American average of 100 to 150 prisoners per 100,000 population and a European average of 60 to 100.   In 2012 the government created the unit for the protection and promotion of human rights in the gendarmerie – the institution in charge of Chile’s penitentiaries – to reduce mistreatment and torture in the country’s prisons.   But according to the annual human rights report of the Diego Portales University, the advances seen in terms of prison policies are far from an integral public policy that would lead to meeting the basic needs of prisoners and to improving compliance with international human rights standards.   Incalcaterra said these situations arise from the fact that “the prison crisis is not a priority on the agendas and programmes of governments in the region.”   The OHCHR official said there is a lack of transparency and regular and independent oversight in prisons, as a fundamental tool to prevent torture and mistreatment and to bring about structural improvements in prison systems.   And although people deprived of their liberty are one of society’s most vulnerable groups, “they are also one of the most unpopular,” he added.   Espinoza said that in the last five years, reforms have been carried out in countries in the region, aimed mainly at providing stronger institutions for the prison systems.   But the crisis, she said, makes it necessary to consider measures that would help bring about definitive solutions in the medium to long term. For example, she mentioned the need to design public policies in the area of security containing social reinsertion components as a key to guaranteeing success in their implementation.   Incalcaterra added that “states and society in general must become aware that the prison crisis in their countries not only affects people deprived of their liberty, but also their families and society as a whole.”   “Prisons are the reflection of a society,” he concluded. Visit the related web page
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