Cambodia: Displaced families settle class action lawsuit against Thai sugar company Mitr Phol
“Displaced Cambodian families reach long-awaited settlement with Thai sugar giant”, 25 June 2025
More than seven hundred families who were driven from their land to make way for an industrial sugar plantation in Cambodia’s Oddar Meanchey Province in 2008 and 2009 have received a payment from the Thai sugar giant Mitr Phol Sugar Corporation Limited. It took seventeen years of sustained advocacy and, ultimately, bringing a class action against the company in Southeast Asia’s first-ever transboundary human rights litigation, but the families have now secured a measure of justice…
Following legal proceedings in Thailand and a court-led mediation process, plaintiffs reached a resolution with the company in February 2025. Mitr Phol agreed to make a substantial, though undisclosed, donation to support the community, which was paid to the families’ fiduciary in May. On May 14, 2025, the court issued an order to dismiss the case…
After a Mitr Phol subsidiary, Angkor Sugar, secured a land concession from the Cambodian government in 2008, the communities and smallholder farmers living on and working the land were forced out to make way for an industrial sugar plantation. Hundreds of families were displaced, losing rice fields, orchards, grazing land, crops and access to forests that sustained their livelihoods. In one village, O’ Bat Moan, police and private security forces violently evicted residents, bulldozed houses, torched fields, and beat and arrested villagers…
This case was the first time in Southeast Asia that a multinational company was sued for alleged tortious activities in a foreign country in a class action suit...