Land tax and land bank needed: TDRI
Play
The People's Movement for a Just Society (P-Move) seminar yesterday urged legal amendments to ensure fair distribution of land ownership and raised concern over foreign investors using legal loopholes to buy and sell plots for profit.
Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI) president Nipon Poapongsakorn said long-standing land problems – like encroachment on state land and officials taking back land which people had lived on for a long time – remained unresolved.
He said there was a lack of government measures to limit large-scale land speculation, while civil service agencies didn’t protect people’s rights and only used laws to determine land-ownership rights. Hence, 435 people had been charged and 1,000 people prosecuted due to the lack of laws to back their rights.
The House tried to pass a law allowing people to make use of state-owned or privately owned land that wasn’t in use, but the change in government had stalled that attempt, Nipon said.
The community land-title deed project pushed by the previous government had become merely a PM’s Office regulation applied on a case-by-case basis.
Nipon urged a continuous push of the “land bank” policy, saying a land tax law should serve as the main mechanism so that landlords who leave land unused would lose it to the land bank. He said the policy should also ensure a fair land market: poor people could get access to land and choose to buy it at an appropriate price.
Law Reform Committee member Pairoj Polpetch said the land-ownership issue could not be considered only by looking at title deeds, as it involved other factors including natural resources, environment and communities, and shouldn’t be based on the principle that anyone with high economic status can own land.
It should be based on land-ownership distribution, creation of land use and control of land use, or else land would only be owned by a small group of people. And foreign investors could profit from Thai land, because land-ownership was governed by money, he said.
Pairoj said violations of human rights and environmental protection were a more important context than the criminal code; justice procedures shouldn’t consider them in the same way.
He said many other facts must be taken into consideration rather than just asking for a land-title deed – or else various facts and true justice would be overlooked.
Investigators, public prosecutors and justice personnel must be neutral, and adjust their views so they were in line with the current situation and abandon the old belief that the only determinant of proper land ownership was to have a land-title deed.
The seminar also discussed a case of Lamphun residents charged with land encroachment, in which the local court will read its verdict on June 6.
