Burma: State Leash on Media Freedoms at its End

With the passage of Burma’s Press Law in April this year, there had been a glimmer of hope that the case of the journalists from Unity Journal​ would be given a bit of protection for their daring expose of an alleged chemical weapons plant in the Magwe division last January.

After all, the new law guaranteed that no journalist may be jailed for doing her or his work […]

Brang Yung Detention Illegal Says United Nations

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has issued a ruling that the detention of the ethnic Kachin farmer Brang Yung is illegal and called for his immediate release, and for adequate reparation.

Brang Yung was arrested in June 2012 by the military-backed government in Burma. He was charged under Article 17/1 of the Unlawful Association Act, and he is serving a 21 year prison sentence in Myitkyina Prison […]

Police Investigations and Prosecutions Used to Harass News Media

Until recently, the media freedom situation in Burma was very promising but this is no longer the case. Reporters Without Borders is alarmed by the interrogation of many newspaper editors since 20 June and by the president’s recent expressions of hostility to freedom of information. In a threatening comment on 7 July, President Thein Sein said: “If there is any media that exploits media freedom and causes harm to national security rather than reporting for the sake of the country, effective legal action will be taken against that media.” […]

Burmese Government Must Stop new Military Operation against Ceasefire Army in Northern Shan State

Since June 2014, the Burma Army has deployed nearly 2,000 troops from over 10 battalions in an operation against a ceasefire group, the Shan State Progress Party/ Shan State Army (a.k.a Shan State Army-North or SSA-N), in Kehsi and Murng Hsu townships. The operation has inflicted human rights abuses against hundreds of local civilians […]

Burma: Four Reporters Sentenced to Lengthy Prison Terms

Paris, Bangkok: The conviction of four reporters to lengthy prison terms is the clearest sign of Burma’s backsliding on press freedom, FIDH and its member organization, the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN-Burma), said today. On 10 July, a court in Pakokku, Magwe Division, sentenced all four Unity Weekly reporters Lu Maw Naing, Yarzar Oo, Paing Thet Kyaw, and Sithu Soe and the Unity Weekly CEO Tint San to 10 years in prison with hard labor under the 1923 Official Secrets Act […]

Burma: Journalists Given 10 years’ Hard Labour for Article on Chemical Weapons Factory

The sentencing of five media workers in Myanmar each to 10 years’ imprisonment with hard labour for “disclosing state secrets” makes today a dark day for freedom of expression in the country, Amnesty International said.

A court in the town of Pakokku today handed down the sentences to four reporters and the CEO of the Unity newspaper – Lu Maw Naing, Yarzar Oo, Paing Thet Kyaw, Sithu Soe and Tint San […]

High-level Intimidation of Chin Women Activists Exposes Systemic Impunity for Military Rape

On June 10, 2014, a soldier from Burma Army Light Infantry Battalion no. 269, stationed at Razua, in Matupi Township, Chin State, attempted to rape a local Chin woman, aged 54, badly injuring her. When the police handed over the perpetrator, Myo Thura Kyaw, to the Razua military base, many local people worried that proper justice would not be served. They began questioning his whereabouts and demanding transparent prosecution under a civilian court. In a similar case last year, a soldier from the same base who had attempted to rape a 14-year-old girl was let off without punishment […]

အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေပၚ စစ္တပ္က လိင္မႈဆုိင္ရာ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ ဆန္႔က်င္လႈပ္ရွားမႈအား အာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ႏွိပ္ကြက္ျခင္းကုိ ရပ္တန္႔ေပးေရး ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ႔၏ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ဇြန္လ (၁၀) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အသက္ (၅၄)ႏွစ္ရွိ ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးတစ္ဦးအား ခလရ ၂၆၉ မွ တပ္မေတာ္သား တစ္ဦးက မုဒိမ္းက်င့္ ရန္ႀကိဳးစားရာ မိမိကုိယ္ကုိ ခုခံရာ တြင္ ျပင္းထန္စြာ ဒဏ္ရာရရွိခဲ့ၿပီး ေရဇြာ ျပည္သူ႔ေဆးရုံတြင္ ေဆးရုံတင္ကုသမႈ ခံလွ်က္ရွိပါသည္။ တပ္မေတာ္သားအား ဖမ္းဆီးထားၿပီး ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ခါတုိင္း ကဲ့သုိ႔ပင္ အေရးယူမႈ တကယ္မလုပ္ပဲ လြတ္သြားမည္ကုိ ေဒသခံမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ စုိးရိမ္ေနၾကပါသည္။ ထုိ႔ေၾကာင့္ ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ႔သည္ ဇြန္လ (၁၅၊ ၁၆)ရက္ေန႔ တြင္ ေရဇြာ ရဲစခန္းသုိ႔ စခန္းျပခြင့္ ေတာင္းယူခဲ့ၾကရာ အပယ္ခ် ခံခဲ့ရပါသည္ […]

One Month On From Signing Sexual Violence Declaration – No Action Taken

One month on from signing the Declaration Of Commitment To End Sexual Violence In Conflict, the government of Burma appear to have taken no steps at all to implement the declaration.

Burma Campaign UK published a new briefing paper today looking at the 12 commitments the government has made to end sexual violence, and the progress made so far on each of these. Each was rated zero progress […]

HURFOM Releases the Report of “In Pursuit of Justice: Reflections on the Past and Hopes for the Future of Burma”

In order for Burma to successfully transition towards genuine democracy and national reconciliation, the Burmese government must address, and act upon, the specific needs expressed by victims of past human rights abuse, says the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM) in a report released this morning. The 90-page report, titled In Pursuit of Justice: Reflections on the past and hopes for the future of Burma, details the history of human rights violations perpetrated in Burma’s ethnic minority areas, and analyzes how to repair the relationship between the government and citizens to rebuild trust and move through a peaceful transition towards a united future Burma […]