In 2018, every week more than three people were murdered, defending their land and environment from destructive industries like mining, logging and agribusiness. These killings represent the extreme end of a spectrum of violence and threats directed at land rights defenders.
In the past decade, significant international attention focused on “land grabs” in developing countries by companies and others hungry for land to grow food and procure resources for the world’s growing population.
Montenegro is preparing another millennial nationalization, as land grabbing becomes a country’s law, with 293 million square metres of seacoast territories to be seized. Private property is being treated as a money machine, leaving owners deprived.
Yet processes that change peoples’ access to land, and the diverse processes of human mobility that land transformations generate, often take decades to unfold. Research on Indonesia's large scale oil palm plantations shows the importance of attending to these long term processes.
Over the last 10 years, a clear consensus has emerged: investments in land should be done responsibly. However, understanding tenure-related risk in the context of land-based agricultural investments in emerging markets can be complex.
For individual women and men within communities, these complexities can have severe and negative effects on their land and livelihoods. This is especially true for more vulnerable members of the community: widowed or divorced women, youth, and ethnic minorities.
Until now, a comprehensive study of national-level expropriation, compensation, and resettlement procedures in 50 countries across has not been conducted. My PhD research project, facilitated by the University of Groningen Faculty of Law, aims to bridge this gap by providing a broad comparative analysis of nation legal frameworks in 50 countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America to determine whether legal procedures in these countries adopt internationally recognized standards on expropriation, compensation, and resettlement.
From November 28 to December 23, 2016, Land Portal hosted a successful Land Debate on land valuation and fair compensation. The debate focused on the question of what is fair compensation for land in cases of land tenure changes (e.g. expropriations and voluntary land transfers), and what measures are sufficient to ensure the livelihoods of affected landholders are restored.
The Rethinking Expropriation Law initiative hosted a Conference on Compensation for Expropriation in Cape Town, South Africa on December 7-9, 2016. The final session of the Conference took place on December 9 and aimed at discussing the development of a protocol on fair compensation.
For the final session in Cape Town, scholars, judges, activists, and government officials from around the world sat together to provide input on what guidance and principles should be included in the protocol on fair compensation.
SESSION 4: FACTORS OF COMPENSATION; VALUE OF LAND
Dr Shai Stern (Dr. Shai Stern (Professor of Law, Bar-Ilan University)
Restoring Justice in Expropriation Law
