Land disputes have choked Bangladesh's courts for decades, but the government hopes new steps to bring justice will succeed where others have failed
DHAKA (AlertNet) - Land disputes have choked Bangladesh's courts for decades prolonging the suffering, especially of the poorest, but the government hopes new steps to bring justice will succeed where others have failed.
More than 1.9 million legal cases are languishing in the judicial system, and of these more than two-thirds are disputes about land.
Land ownership is a longstanding source of conflict in this low-lying river delta nation, where shifting rivers, an antiquated land records management system and corruption have all contributed to an ever-growing legal backlog.
It is a race against time to unclog the system before the country of 160 million people has a new wave of land disputes to deal with, as is expected.
Climate change is raising sea levels, and scientists predict this will swallow up to 12 percent of the country's land by mid-century, causing mass displacement with millions of people looking for land to live on.
The government said recently it was moving to address the problem by digitising land records and redistributing some government farmland to landless peasants.
That may help, but now, as before, it is Bangladesh's poor - vulnerable to illegal land grabs and with few resources to defend themselves - who are usually hardest-hit.
"Our judiciary system is unfriendly to the poor. People who possess huge money win in the cases and the poor become victimised," said Shamsul Huda, executive director of the Association for Land Reform and Development (ALRD). "Maybe less than 5 percent of people get legal support from government and NGOs. It has to be raised."
In a nation where a century-old land registration system is only now being updated, forgery of land documents is common. Land owners regularly find that their property has been sold to others without their knowledge, and are forced to initiate court cases in an attempt to get their land back.
With cases usually taking years to be heard, families are often forced to spend huge sums to try to recover property, which they may have to find by selling other property. In this way, families are regularly set on the road to becoming landless.
"Appropriate land reform and its effective enforcement is a must to help ensure the land rights of disadvantaged, weaker and minority people," Huda said.
History is not on their side.
In 1950, when Bangladesh was still a British colony, the ceiling for individual land ownership was fixed at 33.33 acres - a measure no government has enforced. The country's wealthy ignored a demand to hand over excess property to the state.
In 1984, a Land Reform Act further reduced the ceiling for individual ownership of land to 20 acres. Again, the rule was ignored, as was a subsequent effort to carry out agrarian reform and divide the country's land more evenly.
Instead, influential elites expanded their holdings by grabbing 1.3 million hectares of government-owned land, Rezaul Karim Hira, Bangladesh's land minister, said recently.
Finance Minister A.M.A. Muhith has told parliament that the country would now digitise land records.
Liaquat Ali Siddiqui, a professor at the University of Dhaka, said: "Modernisation of the land record system can help minimise the complications."
He added that if land documents for a piece of property were forged, it could take a long time for the genuine owner to prove ownership, largely because the records system is antiquated.
In 2000, Bangladesh's government passed a legal aid act intended to help the country's poorest in legal cases, but few people have so far received support. A more effective way to address the problem, Siddiqui suggested, would be to introduce a ‘no-win-no-fee' type legal aid system using private lawyers, as in the United States and Britain.
Right now, "70 to 80 percent of people do not go to the court system, fearing further loss of properties", said Adilur Rahman Khan Shuvra, an advocate and secretary of Odhikar, a Bangladesh rights organisation. "Access to justice is very far from poor people's reach."
Shuvra said families who have lost their land to river erosion are forced to go to the cities and live in overcrowded slums.
And as well as pushing sea levels up, climate change is aggravating storm surges and seawater intrusion into drinking water and farmland, making ever larger regions of the country's coastal belt uninhabitable.
Syful Islam is a senior reporter with The New Nation newspaper in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
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