AAPP 2010 Annual Report:Political Prisoners in Burma

By Assistance Association for Political Prisoners - Burma • January 13, 2011

The Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) today released a report, highlighting the ongoing systematic violations of human rights and the denial of fundamental freedoms faced by the countries pro-democracy activists during 2010 and the devastating consequences of engaging in political activism.

Throughout the past year, AAPP has documented the ongoing imprisonment of political activists, individuals associated with activists, as well as ordinary civilians peacefully expressing their basic civil and political rights. According to the report, in 2010, 53 activists were arrested. The report details the impact of systematic torture, long-term imprisonment, transfers to remote prisons, incommunicado detention and the denial of adequate medical care on Burma’s political activists. The cases of torture and denial of medical care, documented, were particularly alarming in their severity during 2010.

The total number of political prisoners in poor health reached its peak in December with at least 142 in need of medical care. These include; comedian Zarganar, 88 Generation Students leader Min Ko Naing, and Buddist Monk U Gambira. Dire prison conditions coupled with the denial of medical treatment led to the death of human rights activist, Ko Kyaw Soe, in May and Buddhist monk, U Naymeinda, in December. The harsh sentences handed down and the torture and punishments inflicted on political activists threatens the wider population, sending a clear message: refrain from opposition activities or risk the consequences. The consequences are well known.

These practices ensure populations live in fear, thereby preventing any politically critical activities. This fear stifles dissent, prevents a vibrant civil society and halts any criticism of the regime; key components of a genuine democratic transition.

Download the annual report below in English.

Annual Report Letter.

AAPP 2010 Annual Report.

ႏိုုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေ႐ွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ျမန္မာႏိုုင္ငံ) မွ ၂၀၁၀ ခုုႏွစ္ ႏွစ္ပတ္လည္ အစီရင္ခံစာကိုု ထုုတ္ေဝခဲ့ပါသည္။ ၎အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ ၂၀၁၀ ခုုႏွစ္တႏွစ္လံုုး မွတ္တမ္းျပဳစုုခဲ့သည္မ်ားကိုု အႏွစ္ခ်ဳပ္ သံုုးသပ္တင္ျပထားျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဒီမိုုကေရစီ အသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းေရးေတြ လုုပ္ေဆာင္ေနပါသည္ဟုု စစ္အစိုုးရမွ မည္မွ်ပင္ ေျပာဆိုုေနေစကာမႈ ဒီမိုုကေရစီႏွင့္ လုူ႕အခြင့္အေရး ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုုးတက္လာရန္အတြက္ ဦးေဆာင္လႈပ္႐ွားခဲ့သူမ်ား၊ ပါဝင္လုုပ္ေဆာင္သူခဲ့မ်ား၊ ဝိုုင္းဝန္းကူညီေဆာင္႐ြက္ခဲ့သူမ်ား ရဟန္းသံဃာမ်ားကိုုပါ မတရားဖမ္းဆီး ေထာင္ခ်႐ံုုသာမက အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ လက္စြဲဥပေဒထဲမွာပါဝင္သည့္ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကိုုပါ ပိတ္ပင္ၿပီး စိတ္ပိုုင္း၊ ႐ုုပ္ပိုုင္းဆိုုင္ရာ ညွင္းပမ္းႏိွပ္စက္မႈမ်ားကိုု တရားဝင္ လုုပ္ပိုုင္ခြင့္တခုုကဲ့သို႔ ျပဳမူလုုပ္ကိုုင္ေနျခင္းမ်ားကိုု ယမန္ႏွစ္(၂၀၀၉ ခုုႏွစ္) အေျခအေနမ်ားႏွင့္ ထင္႐ွားစြာ ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္သံုးသပ္ျပထားပါသည္။