A/HRC/41/39/Add.2 the injustices committed, provide land and humanitarian relief to community members, as appropriate, and release detainees to demonstrate goodwill and eliminate a festering sore. 34. Land management must also take into account existing land use and the complex impacts of loss of land and subsequent resettlement. Any approach to land, whether initiated by the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment or as a result of investment or forestry policies, that blindly assumes that people can lose land that they rely upon or be resettled without risking serious adverse consequences is bound to produce further impoverishment and discontent. 35. The Government should conduct a thorough assessment of the implementation and impact of resettlement, expropriation and compensation. The review should evaluate the 2018 Law on Resettlement and Vocation in terms of human rights and other relevant standards. It should lead to a more transparent, systematic and equitable compensation framework that accurately compensates people for the productive value of their property. 36. The legal framework should protect the land tenure and livelihood rights of all people, including the hundreds of thousands who currently live in areas that have only in recent decades been designated as “forests”, those who rely on communal land and those who practice shifting cultivation. It should be an essential goal of current land titling reform efforts. Land titling should be undertaken in a way that does not undermine access to the land that people depend upon, avoiding the imposition of unduly burdensome evidentiary requirements to prove historic land use and requirements for unrealistic or unsustainable periods of continuous use. Customary land tenure should be protected. 37. The Government should establish an independent body for oversight and evaluation of the environmental, social and human rights impacts of natural resource-related and other large infrastructure projects and industrial plantations, including on those who are subject to involuntary resettlement and loss of land. The body should have a confidential complaint mechanism, through which it directly receives complaints from individuals and communities, without the requirement to exhaust alternative remedies. The mechanism should be empowered to investigate allegations and prescribe appropriate remedies. 38. The international community must take stock of its own failures with regard to land management. It has a history of supporting resettlement programmes that reportedly had many of the same problematic effects as those witnessed by the Special Rapporteur. The World Bank’s previous engagement on land titling is reported to have secured the tenure of the wealthy, while leaving the poor vulnerable. With renewed World Bank involvement in land management, concerns raised repeatedly by civil society and development partners must be reflected in the land and forestry law reforms and an account taken of the Government’s past failures to implement many of the so-called “sustainable” policies advised for the hydropower sector. C. Rethinking hydropower 39. As the Prime Minister rightly recognized following the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy dam collapse disaster in 2018, the time has come for a national review of the hydropower sector. The Government should be commended for opening a dialogue on the future of hydropower and the role of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic as an exporter of power, however, the details of the suspension imposed after the collapse are unclear and appear not to apply to the many planned dams already under consideration. The scope of the current review is unduly narrow. The World Bank is leading a process that considers only dam safety, rather than the full impact of existing and planned hydropower dams. One-off reviews of individual dams are inadequate. 40. For economic, social and environmental reasons, the Government should heed recommendations by experts such as the Mekong River Commission and conduct a comprehensive review of the role and future of the hydropower sector, looking at the current and future impacts of existing and planned dams, how many and which projects should go forward and how construction and operation arrangements should be adjusted in 10