Burma: Sentencing of Human Rights Defenders Messrs U Aung Soe, U Maung San and Ko Soe Thu

On 8 July 2013, human rights defenders Messrs U Aung Soe, U Maung San and Ko Soe Thu were handed additional sentences increasing their prison terms to 11 years and six months in the case of U Aung Soe, and to two years and six months in the case of U Maung San and Ko Soe Thu. U Aung Soe is a member of the Yangon People’s Support Network. All three are human rights defenders who were arrested in the context of their peaceful opposition to a copper mine and human rights violations connected to its operation […]

UK Must Insist on Commitments from Myanmar President on Minority Rights

Ahead of President Thein Sein’s upcoming visit to London, Refugees International (RI) calls on the British government to demand action from Myanmar on protections for minority groups and citizenship for the stateless Rohingya.

“The British government has been focused on the positive reforms seen under President Thein Sein and the initial steps towards democratization in Myanmar. But these steps are reversible, and it is not in the interests of Myanmar for the international community to ignore the serious human rights abuses that persist in the country,” said RI Senior Advocate Melanie Teff […]

CSW Urges UK to Put Human Rights at the Heart of Burmese President’s Visit

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) today urged the British Government to ensure that continuing grave violations of human rights, including freedom of religion or belief, are put at the heart of discussions with Burma’s President Thein Sein during his visit to the United Kingdom next week […]

Press Release on the Arrest of Wai Phyo

Wai Phyo@Gali, Secretary of Generation Wave was arrested by Aung Lin Chief of Pyay Township police station (1) at 11:30 July 10th 2013. The police said they arrested him for a “Free Political Prisoners” poster campaign which he organized in July 2011. For that activity two other members of Generation Wave were arrested in July 2011 and sentenced for 3months imprisonment or 30,000 Kyats penalty in February 2012. Wai Phyo was escaped from arrest and police issued warrant on him since then […]

Think Everything’s OK In Burma Now? – New Awareness Raising Campaign

Burma Campaign UK today launches a new awareness raising campaign using the strapline, ‘Think everything’s ok in Burma now?’ The awareness raising campaign is designed to draw attention to ongoing human rights abuses in Burma, and the lack of fundamental democratic reforms in the country […]

First U.S. Companies Release Reports on Investments in Myanmar

A handful of U.S. companies released public reports on their investments in Myanmar last week, as required by the State Department and other agencies administering the U.S. sanctions regime. The reporting companies are involved in offshore oil and gas activities, as well as passive investments in a Singapore-based company doing significant business in Myanmar. More reports from U.S. companies, including from Coca-Cola, are expected towards the end of the year […]

Burma’s Plans to Expand Mawchi Tin Mines Risk Derailing Karenni Peace Process

The Burmese government’s plans to expand the Mawchi tin mines are in violation of its latest ceasefire agreement with the Karenni National Progress Party (KNPP) and should be stopped immediately.

In the past few months, new roads and housing have been built by a Chinese company, in preparation for large-scale expansion of the Mawchi mines around Saethongon village. The villagers were told last year they must leave their homes when the expansion begins but have been given no other information […]

Kachin Organizations and Civil Society Groups Urge the United States Government to Renew the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act

We, Kachin civilians and activists from 30 organizations are calling on President Obama, Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Reid to renew the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act, which will expire at the end of July 2013.

It is urgently needed to maintain pressure on the Burmese government to stop its policies of military aggression, and to begin a political dialogue to end the civil war in Burma […]

ကခ်င္ျပည္သူလူထုႏွင့္ အရပ္ဘက္လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား ေတြ႔ဆံုညွိႏႈိင္းေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္အစုိးရႏွင့္ KIO တုိ႔အၾကား ခ်ဳပ္ဆုိခဲ့သည့္ ၁၉၉၄ ခုႏွစ္၊ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး သေဘာတူစာခ်ဳပ္ သည္ (၁၇) ႏွစ္ၾကာျပီးသည့္ေနာက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇြန္လ ၉ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ပ်က္ျပားခဲ့ျပီး တုိက္ပြဲမ်ားျပန္လည္စ တင္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည္မွာ ၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇြန္လ ၉ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ႏွစ္ႏွစ္တင္းတင္းျပည့္ခဲ့ျပီ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ႏွစ္ႏွစ္တာ ကာလအတြင္း ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္အစုိးရႏွင့္ KIO တုိ႔အၾကား ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမ်ားကုိ အၾကိမ္ေပါင္း […]

Upper Burma Court Sentences Three Human Rights Defenders to Long-Term Imprisonment; Guards Intimidate Lawyer

On 8 July, Shwebo Township court handed out additional sentences to U Aung Soe, U Maung San and Ko Soe Thu, increasing their prison terms to respectively 11 years and six months and two years and six months. The three human rights defenders were previously detained, held incommunicado and sentenced in unfair trials for their opposition to the Letpadaung Copper Mine […]