An Interfaith and Peace Activist has been Arrested

A Burmese Muslim activist, Zaw Zaw Latt, who has been working tirelessly for interfaith peace building in Burma, has been arrested.

Zaw Zaw Latt was arrested at 8 pm, on 14th July in Chan Aye Thar Zan Township, Mandalay. He was arrested in a café by police officer U Soe Naing, who arrested him without an arrest warrant. Zaw Zaw Latt is charged under section 17/1 of the penal code for unlawful association with a blacklisted organisation […]

Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Leila Zerrougui, Concludes Her First Visit to Myanmar

The United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) for children and armed conflict, Leila Zerrougui, concluded a five-day visit to Myanmar today. Her first visit to the country, at the invitation of the Government, aimed to assess the impact of the conflict on children in accordance with United Nations Security Council resolution 1612, focusing in particular on the implementation of the Joint Action Plan (JAP) signed in 2012 by the Government and the Country Task Force on Monitoring and Reporting (CTFMR) to end and prevent the recruitment and use of children by the armed forces of Myanmar (Tatmadaw). The SRSG visited Nay Pyi Taw, Yangon, Mandalay and Myitkyina (Kachin state) […]

ေမာင္းမကန္ေက်းရြာသူ/ေက်းရြာသားမ်ား၏သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ထား၀ယ္ခရုိင္ ၊ေလာင္းလုံးျမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ေမာင္းမကန္ေက်းရြာသည္ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာႏွစ္ေပါင္းတစ္ရာေက်ာ္ကတည္းက
တည္ရွိ ေသာ ေက်းရြာတစ္ရြာျဖစ္ျပီး ေဒသခံအမ်ားစုမွာ ပင္လယ္ငါးဖမ္းလုပ္ငန္းျဖင့္ အဓိကသက္ေမြး၀မ္းေက်ာင္းျပဳကာ လုပ္ ကိုင္လ်က္ရွိေသာ ေက်း ရြာတစ္ရြာျဖစ္သည္ […]

Myanmar: Immediately and Unconditionally Release Imprisoned Media Workers

One year after five media workers from the Unity newspaper were given long jail sentences and five media workers from the Bi-Midday Sun newspaper were detained – later sentenced and jailed – solely for their peaceful journalistic activities, Amnesty International calls on the Myanmar authorities to immediately and unconditionally release them and all other prisoners of conscience in the country […]

Asian Highway Project Undermines Peace in Karen State

(10 July 2015) – The Karen Peace Support Network (KPSN) is alarmed by recent fighting between the Burma Army and the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) along the recently completed section of the Asian Highway between Myawaddy and Kawkareik. The Burma Army began heavy fire on DKBA positions along the road in the early morning of 2 July. Fighting has lasted for one week, has spread to other parts of Karen State, and tensions remain high. This is the fourth instance of armed clashes in the area in the past year, breaking out amidst rising tensions over control of the highway, which is slated to officially open later this month […]

ASEAN Parliamentarians Welcome Announcement of Myanmar Election Date, but Raise Concerns Ahead of the Vote

JAKARTA, 10 July 2015 – ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) today welcomed Myanmar’s announcement of a date for its long-awaited general election, but warned that a nationwide vote alone was not enough to guarantee the country’s continued transition to democracy […]

US. Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell: Outcome of Fall Elections will Signal State of Political Reform in Burma

‘In light of the recent defeat of constitutional reform, I believe that steps, such as including Burma in the Generalized System of Preferences program, should be put on hold until after this fall’s election. Only after the ballots have been cast and counted in Burma can an appropriate evaluation be made about the pace of reform in the country and whether additional normalization of relations is warranted […]’

Statement by the Spokesperson on the Legislative Passage of the “Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage Bill” in Myanmar

The Myanmar Parliament has passed the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage Bill, the second of four in a package of laws referred to as the “race and religion protection bills” […]

Vice Chair of Democratic Caucus Joe Crowley on the Announcement of an Election Date in Burma

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-Queens, the Bronx), Vice Chair of the Democratic Caucus and a leader in the House of Representatives on Burma, released the statement below on the announcement by Burma’s leaders that general elections will be held on November 8 […]

Save the Salween River

The Salween/Thanlwin River is the second longest river in Southeast Asia, invaluable for the survival of the ethnic people who live along it. It not only has great historical significance but is also avital lifeline nourishing a wide range of biodiversity […]