Presidential Hopefuls in Myanmar’s 2015 Elections

Myanmar’s General Elections being held on 8 November 2015 will determine the Assembly of the Union (Pyidaungsu Hluttaw) which comprises of the Lower House of Parliament (People Assembly, Pyithu Hluttaw) and the Upper House of Parliament (National Assembly, Amyotha Hluttaw) as well as the regional assemblies of the fourteen states and regions […]

Myanmar: Open for Business? Corporate Crime and Abuses at Myanmar Copper Mine

This report focuses on the Monywa copper mine project and highlights forced evictions, substantial environmental and social impacts, and the repression, sometimes brutal, of those who try to protest. It also raises serious questions about opaque corporate dealings and possible infringements of economic sanctions on Myanmar.

A Foreseeable Disaster in Burma: Forced Displacement in the Thilawa Special Economic Zone

Executive Summary

Recent liberalization of some governmental policies in Burma (officially the Union of Myanmar) has led to the lifting of a number of bilateral sanctions and increases in foreign aid and investment. Both governments and corporations are entering into partnerships with Burmese companies to undertake major development projects, including building special economic zones (SEZ), developing hydroelectric dams, signing concession agreements for mining operations, and building pipelines. Despite their potential to create opportunities for economic advancement, such development projects are causing widespread forced displacement throughout the country, undermining the human rights of the people living in affected areas.

Forced displacement threatens people on every continent. Environmental degradation, conflict, the race for scarce resources, development projects, and land grabs have caused a significant number of these illegal displacements. People living in marginalized communities, including ethnic minorities and indigenous groups, are particularly vulnerable to forced displacement. […]

ထားဝယ္ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားမ်ား ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ျခင္းအေပၚ သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ပုဂၢလိက ကုမၸဏီတစ္ခုခုမွျဖစ္ေစ ျပည္သူမ်ားပိုင္ဆိုင္ေသာ လယ္ယာေျမမ်ားေပၚတြင္ ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရး စီမံကိန္းမ်ား ေဖာ္ေဆာင္မည္ဆိုပါက ထိုက္တန္ေသာ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးေပးျခင္း၊ လယ္ယာေျမအစားထိုးေပးျခင္း၊ ျပည္သူမ်ား ေဒသခံမ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်လည္ေအာင္ ညွိႏႈိင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ျပီး သေဘာတူညီမႈရရွိမွသာ […]

Kachin Group Slams China’s New CSR Report on Irrawaddy Dams

A Kachin group today criticized the new corporate social responsibility report on the controversial Irrawaddy dams, calling for a locally-led development process, not one benefiting only China […]

New Investment in Dawei Project Must Follow International Best Practices

Ahead of this week’s Japan-ASEAN summit, the Dawei Development Association calls on the Japanese government, development agencies and investors to refrain from investing in the Dawei Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Tanintharyi Region until international best practices are firmly […]

Call for an International Legally Binding Instrument on Human Rights, Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises

We, the undersigned organisations, Concerned about the continuing abuses and violations of human rights occurring all over the world which directly or indirectly engage the responsibility of business enterprises; Concerned also that such abusive conduct often disproportionately impacts women, who comprise the majority of workers in the most vulnerable sectors, peasants, indigenous peoples, persons living […]

Remarks by EU High Representative Catherine Ashton at the Press Conference at the End of the EU-Myanmar Task Force Meeting

“It has been a great privilege to be here for two days. We had over 600 people who participated in the Task Force including over 100 European Union business leaders, who have travelled here from all over to express their willingness and commitment to support this country on the journey […]

37 Organizations Urge President Obama to Update Blacklist with Respect to Burma

Updated Sanctions Crucial for Responsible US Investment

Today, November 7, 2013, thirty-seven organizations submitted a joint letter to President Barack Obama calling on the US Administration to update the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list with respect to Burma and implement unambiguous criteria for removing and adding persons to the list […]

Burma: US Should Update Blacklist

The United States government should ensure that remaining sanctions on Burma are kept up-to-date on human rights abusers, Human Rights Watch and 36 other organizations said today in a joint letter to President Barack Obama. The Obama administration should move quickly to revise the Treasury […]