Ethnic Politics and the 2015 Elections in Myanmar

Myanmar/Burma is heading to the polls in November 2015, in what will be
a closely watched election. Provided that they are free and fair, the polls
are likely to have a major influence over the future political direction of the
country, with an expected shift in power from the old elite to the opposition
National League for Democracy (NLD) […]

Joint Statement on Disenfranchisement and ‘Policy of Exclusion’ of the Rohingya

The undersigned Rohingya Organizations in Europe have strongly denounced the undemocratic actions of the Election Commission against Rohingya parliamentary candidates under the government’s ‘policy of exclusion’ of the Rohingya, debarring them from contesting in the upcoming crucial election scheduled on November 8, 2015, on a false and fabricated charge that their parents were not citizens […]

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူမ်ားကို ဘယ္လိုကာကြယ္ေပးမလဲ ။

(ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ -၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔) ျမန္မာအစုိးရအေနျဖင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူမ်ားအား ပစ္မွတ္ထား ဖိႏွိပ္ျခင္း၊ ခ်ဳပ္ျခယ္ျခင္း၊ ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ဖြင့္ဟထုတ္ေဖာ္ ျခင္း မျပဳႏုိင္ဘဲ အသံတိတ္သြားေစရန္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနျခင္းမ်ားအား အျမန္ဆံုးရပ္တန္႔ရမည့္အျပင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူ (HRD) မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ၎တုိ႔၏ တန္ဖုိးရွိၿပီး တရား၀င္မႈရွိေသာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား အႏၱရာယ္ကင္းကင္း ဆက္လက္ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္ေစရန္ ဥပေဒႏွင့္ တရားစီရင္ေရး ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ယႏၱရားမ်ား အားေကာင္းလာေစေရး မျဖစ္မေနေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္လည္း လုိအပ္သည္ဟု ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ေအေအပီပီ)ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့အေရး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ား (BP) တုိ႔မွ ၎တို႔ယေန႔ပူးတဲြထုတ္ေ၀ေသာ အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ ေျပာဆုိလုိက္ပါသည္။ […]

Burma Army Flexes its Muscles in Political Purge

In a dramatic development on the August 12, Parliamentary Speaker, Shwe Mann was ousted from his position as Chair of the ruling party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Security forces surrounded USDP headquarters in Naypyidaw and purged the influential political figure from his position within the party. Information Minister, Ye Htut, stated that his close relationship with National League for Democracy (NLD) leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as support for constitutional change that would reduce the power of the Burma Army was behind his ouster […]

Thein Sein, Shwe Mann, Should Reveal 1988 Role and Military History

On the 27th anniversary of the crushing of the pro-democracy uprising on 8/8/88, Burma Campaign UK is calling on President Thein Sein, Speaker Shwe Mann, and all election candidates or potential Presidential candidates with a military background to publish their military records in full and their role in the crushing of the pro-democracy uprising in 1988 […]

End of Mission Statement Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar

I conclude my third official visit to the country as Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar as the country is coming to grips with the scale of destruction and loss of human life caused by the floods. I conveyed my deepest sympathies and profound sadness to all those I met during the mission and wish to renew those sentiments publicly now and particularly to the families of the victims and all those who have been affected by this disaster […]

The Release of all Human Rights Defenders and Political Prisoners is a Benchmark for Free and Fair Elections

Burma Partnership and the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) released the joint report, “How to Defend the Defenders? A Report on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders in Burma and Appropriate Protection Mechanisms” on 25 July 2015. The report highlights the key threats that human rights defenders (HRDs) in Burma face, including oppressive legislation, a corrupt judiciary, violence and a lack of protection, as well as providing policy recommendations to relevant actors. The report points to a picture of a deteriorating human rights situation, in which the authorities are often the main perpetrators or are at least complicit in targeting, oppressing, stifling, controlling and silencing HRDs and the valuable work they carry out.

One of the key tools of repression used by the government, the report highlighted, was the use of Section 18 of the Right to Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession Act (the Assembly Law), among other pieces of legislation. As stated by Bo Kyi, Joint Secretary of AAPP, “The Assembly Law continues to be used extensively by the authorities as a tool to imprison and silence HRDs… the legal system is being used to develop and implement oppressive laws, a practice that signifies the real need for legislative and judicial reform in Burma.” […]