The provincial court in Thailand’s Northeast handed jail terms to four villagers accused of land encroachment and put 29 others on trials under the same charge.
According to Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), the Provincial Court of Sakolnakorn Province in Isan, Thailand’s Northeast, in January sentenced four villagers of Ban Jad Rabeab Community in Phu Pan District of the northeastern province of Sakolnakorn to prison for encroaching on protected areas.
The court sentenced three of the four to four years in jail and handed down two years of prison term to another villager. The jail term of the four, however, was halved since the four pleaded guilty.
The four were some of the 33 embattled villagers of Jad Rabeab Community who were indicted in October 2014 for encroaching on Pa Dong Chom Phu Pan and Pa Dong Kacheu National Parks.
The court has scheduled the witness examination hearing of the rest of the suspects from April to August 2015.
The two national parks were designated as protected areas in 1987. In 2012, the village chief of the community collected names of the villagers who wanted to claim land rights over the some of the occupied lands from the Royal Forestry Department.
In 2014, however, the villagers were indicted four months after the junta’s National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) issued Order No. 64/2014 in June 2014, which states that encroachers into protected areas and poachers of illegal forest goods shall face severe legal actions, TLHR reported.
One of the elderly villagers now facing trial told TLHR that her family settled in the area and used it as farm lands since 1977, 10 years before the areas were declared national parks.
TLHR added that out of the four who were already sentenced to imprisonment, one married couple who was sentenced to two years in jail were indicted for encroaching on 25 rai (0.04 sq.km) into protected areas although the two only occupied 4 rai (0.0064) of the land. Four other suspects were indicted for encroaching on larger plots of protected areas than they initially occupied.
Moreover, six other defendants accused of land encroachment did not occupy any plot of protected area lands as they were indicted, TLHR reported.
According to the NGO Coordinating Committee on Development (NGO-COD) of the Northeast, since last year, 103 small-scale farmers have already been accused of encroaching on protected areas and almost 1,800 in the Northeast have now been prohibited from using their farmland and are about to receive court summons for alleged encroachment.
NGO-COD added that if this trend is allowed to continue, approximately 1.2 million people who are living on land that overlaps protected areas could be affected.