A/HRC/7/42 page 15 64. Victims are rarely able to invoke remedies, including compensation, provided in the law. Mr. Kothari noted the courts’ reluctance to assist in enforcing the law. According to testimonies he received, the investigative procedures adopted by courts to ensure the legitimacy and legality of ownership titles are insufficient. Court decisions allegedly favour those who have acquired titles illicitly, to the detriment of families who should benefit from the 2001 Land Law provisions concerning ownership rights resulting from extended land possession and occupation. Indigenous peoples have suffered greatly, as shown above, even as Cambodia voted for the recent United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted by the General Assembly on 13 September 2007. 65. Kong Yu village is in O’Yadao District of Rattanakiri Province, and is inhabited by indigenous Jarai people. The villagers told the Special Representative, as they have others, that they had reluctantly agreed to part with 50 hectares of their traditional land for “disabled soldiers”. They were later asked for their thumbprints: firstly, when they were inebriated, on blank papers, and subsequently, in the presence of local chiefs, on documents in Khmer, which they do not understand. They received sums of money that they believed to be compensation for the 50 hectares conceded. Then land started to be cleared for a rubber plantation and the villagers were told they had sold 500 hectares to a company, in which a majority shareholder is Keat Kolney, sister of the Minister for Finance and the wife of a senior public servant. They complained to the commune chief, and the next day the district police and gendarmerie threatened villagers with prosecution and imprisonment. Villagers reported that they have lost access to vegetation they used to collect from the forest, have insufficient land for future use, and are unable to leave their cattle free to roam, in case they wander onto the rubber plantation and are confiscated. Children are kept home from school in order to take care of the cattle. 66. When contacted for her side of the story, Keat Kolney arranged for the Special Representative to meet her lawyer and a company manager with whom he had a lengthy discussion on the facts and legal issues. The company’s representatives insisted that the villagers had willingly and knowingly sold all the land and showed copies of the thumb-printed documents and photographs of persons allegedly thumb-printing the documents. 67. The matter is now before the courts, and the Special Representative takes no position on the facts. The significance of the case is that this is precisely the sort of community the Land Law was designed to protect, yet they are losing their land without having the benefit of procedures to protect them, and feel strongly that they have been cheated. E. Civil society undermined 68. The failure to respect existing constitutional guarantees and legal human rights also restricts the exercise by civil society organizations of the fundamental freedoms that are essential to the realization by people of their economic, social and political rights. 69. Organizations assisting local communities to defend their rights to land have been subjected to arbitrary restrictions. In Rattanakiri and Mondulkiri, provincial authorities have been requesting such organizations to apply for permission to visit affected communities and villages, to hold meetings with villagers, to organize workshops on land rights and to protest peacefully against land grabbing. On 16 October 2007, 12 community members affected by a