ABSTRACT
The governmental response to the settlement of land disputes has attracted the keen eyes of foreign observers as a touchstone to test the reach of Myanmar’s democratization. The complexity is added by the current trend of the investors increasingly resorting to the Investor-State Dispute Resolution (ISDS), a procedural framework incorporated in many bilateral investment treaties (BITs) for an investor to sue the government of a host country in an international arbitration, particularly at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a part of the World Bank Group that has a tendency of arbitral awards emphasizing the investor’s interest. The codified laws of the dynasty period before British colonization should be revisited. The essence of 1876 Lower Burma Land and Revenue Act, as the basis of land revenue collection, was a squatter system, by construing the land rights of farmers as “landholder’s rights,” instead of the ownership or proprietary rights.
