Human Rights Defenders Forum Joins Aung Hmaing San’s Call for the Release of All Political Prisoners in Myanmar

By Human Rights Defenders Forum Steering Committee • October 27, 2015

It has been five days since student leader Aung Hmaing San began a hunger strike in Thayarwaddy prison, calling for the release of all the political prisoners across Myanmar. Aung Hmaing San was arrested alongside many other students and supporters when police brutally cracked down on their protest camp in Lapadan Township, Bago Region. More than 70 individuals were arrested, charged and sent to prison in early 2015 for their roles in protests against the National Education Law. According to Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – Burma and Amnesty International, there are nearly 100 political prisoners currently in Myanmar with hundreds more awaiting trial. Just in the past weeks, we have witnessed another series of arrests of human rights defenders for peaceful activities, including Chaw Sandi Tun, Patrick Kum Jaa Lee, Khin Khin Kyaw, Htin Kyaw, Zaw Lu Soe, and numerous others.

While Human Rights Defenders Forum (HRDF) is concerned for Aung Hmaing San’s health, we stand with him in his call for the release of all political prisoners, who are currently detained for their peaceful activism and for exercising their rights to freedom of opinion and expression, assembly and association. Prison authorities must ensure that Aung Hmaing San has full access to information and healthcare without restriction. HRDF condemns all forms of continuing oppression and persecution against peaceful activists and human rights defenders. HRDF, therefore, calls on the government to immediately and unconditionally release Aung Hmaing San and all other political prisoners and detainees and drop all pending charges against human rights defenders who are facing trials simply for exercising their human rights.

Human Rights Defenders Forum Steering Committee is comprised of committed Myanmar and international individuals and organizations working for protection of human rights defenders in Myanmar.

For More Information please contact:

Htoo Kyaw Win (Human Rights Defenders Forum) Mobile: +95 979 4380895;

Thwin Lin Aung (Genuine People Servant) Mobile: +95 (0)250795915,

Thet Swe Win (National Youth Congress) +95 (0)798423902

This statement is also endorsed by the following organizations

Action Committee for Democracy and Development
National Youth Congress
Yangon Youth Network
Equality Myanmar
Human Rights Educators Network
Pandita Development Institute
Green Trust Pyin Oo Lwin
Smile Education and Development Foundation
Generation Wave
Forum for Democracy in Burma
Genuine People Servant
Women Peace Network-Arakan
Civil Rights Defenders
Burma Partnership
Peace Machine
Independent Youth For Change
ပန္းပ်ိဳးလက္လူငယ္စင္တာ
Golden Generation
MasterPeace Myanmar Club
ကဗ်ာခ်စ္သူမ်ားအသင္း
MYAO Youth Action Group
ခ်င္းစာေပနွင့္ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ
သာကီႏြယ္ဖြားဓမၼလူငယ္မ်ားကြန္ယက္
Precious Hands
Peace Cultivation Network ( Youth Department)
ရွမ္းလူငယ္ (ရန္ကုန္)
Giving Hands (Bago)
Simple to Smart
ကိုးကန္႔ လူမႈဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရး အသင္း
ရန္ကုန္ လိုင္ဇာ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး လမ္းေလွ်ာက္အဖြဲ႕
အျဖဴေရာင္ တြဲလက္မ်ား
ဂရုဏာေရာင္စဥ္တန္းမ်ား
Light House Network
Renovator Youth Network
Heart to Heart
Millenium Light Development Organization
Humanatralion Cycle
New History Organization
Myanmar Youth Social and Education Local Focus(MYSELF)
မ်ိဳးဂုဏ္ျမင့္ လူငယ္မ်ား

Download the statement in English here.

သေဘာထားေၾကညာခ်က္ ျမန္မာဘာသာကို ဤေနရာတြင္ ေဒါင္းလုပ္ရယူႏိုင္ပါသည္။

Tags: ASEAN, Crimes against humanity, Human Rights, Human Rights Defenders Forum, Human Rights Violations, National Education Law, Political Prisoners

This post is in: Press Release

Human Rights Defenders Forum Joins Aung Hmaing San’s Call for the Release of All Political Prisoners in Myanmar

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