Myanmar has embarked on a historic political reform process. The holding of competitive elections on 8 November 2015, contested by 91 parties and over 6,000 candidates, is an important milestone in the country’s democratic transition. On Election Day, EU observers reported that the voters of Myanmar turned out in large numbers and calmly cast their votes in a generally well-run polling process, with secrecy of the vote respected […]
• • •On 8 November, Burma/Myanmar held what has been called its “free-est and fairest” election in 25 years. An 80% turnout rate was reported for the 33.5 million Burmese eligible to vote in the election, which saw the first participation of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) in a general election since the (later annulled) 1990 elections […]
• • •The United States congratulates the people of Burma on the November 8 election and commends all of the people and institutions in the country who worked together to hold a peaceful and historic poll. Millions of people from around the country, many of whom were voting for the first time, seized this opportunity to move one step closer to a democracy that respects the rights of all–a testament to the courage and sacrifice shown by the people of Burma over many decades […]
• • •The Union Election Commission (UEC) has received criticism for publishing voter lists that contain numerous errors and for being unable to adequately correct their mistakes. During the initial release of voter lists, complainants noted that the UEC had excluded a number of eligible voters, included voters who were deceased, and printed a number of incorrect information such as birth dates[1]. A subsequent release of voter lists, which the UEC released in order to rectify previous errors, contained further inaccuracies including additional voter exclusions[2]. A particularly drastic example of the incorrect voter lists is the case of Hlaing Tharyar Township, in which 200,000 voters were mysteriously excluded[3]. While there have been numerous cases where citizens have reported incorrect voter lists in remote and rural ethnic areas, such as in Karen State, some villagers do not report to local authorities to have them correct the information due to fear of reprisal […]
• • •(Yangon, 6 November 2015) – The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) welcomes the first popular vote due to take place in two days’ time in Myanmar since its transition to a democratic system. “While recognising the importance of the general elections as a path to open democracy, FORUM-ASIA notes with concern the reluctance of the Government to address human rights concerns, including restrictions of political rights that could impact the credibility of the elections,” says Evelyn Balais-Serrano, the Executive Director of FORUM-ASIA […]
• • •As Myanmar approaches historic elections on Sunday, the diplomatic missions of Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Republic of Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the United Nations reaffirm their support for the people of Myanmar […]
• • •YANGON, 6 November 2015 – The legitimacy of Myanmar’s upcoming general election, scheduled for this Sunday, 8 November, has already been profoundly undermined by government decisions in the lead-up to the poll, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) said today […]
• • •ၿမန္မာ့ႏူိင္ငံေရးသမုိင္းစဥ္တစ္ေလ်ာက္တြင္ အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားသည္ အၿခားေသာႏူိင္ငံမ်ားနည္းတူ ေရြး ေကာက္ခံကုိယ္စားလွယ္၊ မဲေပးသူ၊ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ေလာင္း၊ ႏွင့္ တက္ၾကြႏူိးၾကားမႈရွိေသာ ႏူိင္ငံသားမ်ားအၿဖစ္ၿဖင့္ ပါ၀င္ေနခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ၾကားၿဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအၿပီးရရွိေသာ ကိန္းဂဏန္း မ်ားအရ ၿပည္ေထာင္စုလႊတ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ ၿပည္နယ္ ႏွင့္တုိင္းေဒသၾကီးလႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏွစ္ရပ္ စလုံး၌ အမ်ိဳးသမီးလႊတ္ေတာ္ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ ၅၃ ဦး (၄.၆%) ပါ၀င္ၿပီး ၿပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ ၂၅ ဦး (၇.၈%)၊ အမ်ိဳးသားလႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ ၄ ဦး (၂.၄%)၊ ၿပည္နယ္ႏွင့္ တုိင္းေဒသၾကီး လႊတ္ေတာ္ တြင္ ၂၄ ဦး (၃.၆%) ရွိသည္ၿဖစ္ရာ က်ားမတန္းတူညီမွ်ေရးအတြက္ အနိမ့္ဆုံးလုိအပ္ခ်က္ၿဖစ္ သည့္ အၿပည္ၿပည္ဆုိင္ရာ စံႏႈန္း ၃၀% ၿပည့္မွီရန္ မ်ားစြာလုိပါေသးသည္ […]
• • •The jailing of peaceful activists, restrictions on free speech, discrimination and the political disenfranchisement of minority groups – in particular the persecuted Rohingya– seriously undermine elections in Myanmar, Amnesty International said ahead of the vote on 8 November […]
• • •100 people joined a protest at the British Foreign Office today calling on the British government to support a UN Commission of Inquiry into possible genocide against the Rohingya of Burma […]
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