To Recognize and Repair: Unofficial Truth Projects and the Need for Justice in Burma

The advance towards a free and democratic Burma has so far done little to account for the crimes of its past. Emerging from a military dictatorship and opening its doors to the outside world has certainly led to an increased focus from the international community on the future of the country. As a result of increased scrutiny by the outside world, the U Thein Sein government has repeatedly reiterated their genuine commitment to improving the human rights situation. Despite government statements to the contrary, the situation for human rights defenders, journalists, farmers, land rights activists and civilians particularly in ethnic areas – has not improved […]

Anti-Muslim Activities in Burma

This report prepared based on the information received from a Burma based monitoring network. The report mainly focused on the activities of anti Muslim Buddhist extremist groups and anti Muslim political parties such as Race and Faith Defence League (RFDL), Myanmar National Network (MNN), Peace and Diversity Party (PDP) and other incidents that effect minority Muslims in Burma.
Race and Faith Defence League is also known as Ma Ba Tha in Burmese acronym. Among these organisations and parties, RFDL is the largest organisation, which has a nation wide network, hierarchically structured, functioned by the monks, and supported by government. This is the organisation that proposed four discriminative laws – marriage law, birth control law, religious conversion law and polygamy law that President Thein Sein and the Parliament approving without hesitation. So far, the organisation has about 30000 members across Burma and a very strong network in grassroots level. Its members are available at every town, village, and streets […]

Malaysia: Discovery of Mass Graves a Call to Action

Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM) is extremely saddened by the heart-wrenching discovery of a mass grave of some 100 Rohingya in Perlis. We hope that the Malaysian government will now treat this issue with the seriousness it deserves and ensure an impartial and independent investigation is conducted. We note that there have been reports relating to the existence of such camps and holding houses in Malaysia for some time; we would urge the impartial and independent investigation to include the question of why apparently so little was done to act on these reports until now […]

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္: ႏွစ္ပတ္လည္ အစီရင္ခံစာ ( ၂၀၁၄)

ျပည္ေထာင္စုသမၼတ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၊ ျပည္ေထာင္စု အစုိးရအဖဲြ႔သည္ ဖဲြ႔စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒပါ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ား၏ မူလအခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို ျမွင့္တင္ေရးႏွင့္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးတုိ႔အား ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္ရန္အလုိ႔ငွာ ၂၀၁၁ခုႏွစ္၊ စက္တင္ဘာလ (၅) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အမိန္႔ေၾကာ္ျငာစာ အမွတ္ ( ၃၄/၂၀၁၁) ျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ကုိ အဖြဲ႔၀င္ ( ၁၅) ဦးျဖင့္ ဖဲြ႔စည္းျပီး တာ၀န္ႏွင့္လုပ္ပုိင္ခြင့္မ်ား သတ္မွတ္ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ပါသည္ […]

‘If they had hope, they would speak’: The Ongoing Use of State-Sponsored Sexual Violence in Burma’s Ethnic Communities

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In January 2014, the Women’s League of Burma (WLB) published a report which demonstrated the systematic use of rape by the Burma Army as a strategy to subjugate communities across the country. We documented over a hundred cases of sexual violence in the years since President Thein Sein took office – a number which we believe grossly underestimates the true scale of the problem. Drawing on evidence gathered by our member organisations across Burma, we argued that there are clear links between militarisation, investment and human rights abuses. We also proposed a number of steps to uproot the culture of impunity which surrounds sexual violence, and prevents survivors from obtaining justice. Whilst recent months have seen positive action taken in several areas, the pillars which provide impunity for perpetrators of human rights abuses remain in place. In January, we called for constitutional reform to place the military under civilian control; the establishment of effective judicial and non-judicial mechanisms to investigate human rights abuses, particularly those relating to sexual violence, and; greater participation of women in the peace process dialogue. […]

Legal Memorandum: War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Eastern Myanmar

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In January 2011, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic (“the Clinic”) began to investigate the actions of the Myanmar Army during a military offensive in eastern Myanmar (“the Offensive”) that began in late 2005 and lasted approximately three years. The Clinic sought to determine whether violations of international criminal law occurred during the Offensive, and whether there exist reasonable grounds to assert that individual military officers could be held responsible for those crimes. The Clinic’s investigation focused specifically on the conduct of two military units—Southern Regional Military Command (“Southern Command”) and Light Infantry Division 66 (“LID 66”)—in Thandaung Township, Kayin State. […]

Myanmar: End Wartime Torture in Kachin State and Northern Shan State

(Yangon)— For the past three years, Myanmar authorities have systematically tortured Kachin civilians perceived to be aligned with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), Fortify Rights said in a new report released today. Fortify Rights believes these abuses constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. The government of Myanmar should intervene immediately to end the use of torture in the conduct of the ongoing war in Kachin State and northern Shan State, and it should credibly investigate and prosecute members of the Myanmar Army, Myanmar Police Force, and Military Intelligence who are responsible for the serious crimes described in this report.

The 71-page report, “I Thought They Would Kill Me”: Ending Wartime Torture in Northern Myanmar, describes the systematic use of torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment (“ill treatment”) of more than 60 civilians by Myanmar authorities from June 2011 to April 2014. Members of the Myanmar Army, Myanmar Police Force, and Military Intelligence deliberately caused severe and lasting mental and physical pain to civilians in combat zones, […]

Same Impunity, Same Pattern: Sexual Abuses by the Burma Army Will Not Stop Until There is a Genuine Civilian Government

Almost a decade ago, the Women’s League of Burma (WLB) denounced systematic patterns of sexual crimes committed by the Burma Army against ethnic women and demanded an end to the prevailing system of impunity. Today WLB is renewing these calls. Three years after a nominally civilian government came to power; state-sponsored sexual violence continues to threaten the lives of women in Burma.

Women of Burma endure a broad range of violations; this report focuses on sexual violence, as the most gendered crime. WLB and its member organizations have gathered documentation showing that over 100 women have been raped by the Burma Army since the elections of 2010. Due to restrictions on human rights documentation, WLB believes these are only a fraction of the actual abuses taking place […]

Training War Criminals? – British Training of the Burmese Army

This briefing examines the British government’s controversial military training to the Burmese Army.

The training is taking place despite the Burmese Army still committing serious human rights abuses which violate international law. Crimes committed by the Burmese Army since the reform process began include rape and gang rape of ethnic women, including children, deliberate targeting of civilians, arbitrary execution, arbitrary detention, torture, mutilations, looting, bombing civilian areas, blocking humanitarian assistance, destruction of property, and extortion. Many of these abuses could be classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity […]

Undermining the Peace Process: Burmese Army Atrocities Against Civilians in Putao, Northern Kachin State

Despite ongoing peace negotiations with the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), in early September 2013 Burmese government troops raided the village of Nhka Ga, near Putao in northern Kachin State, accusing the villagers of supporting the KIA. They detained and tortured ten villagers, shot three men to death, and raped the wife of one of the detainees. The troops have since been encamped in the village, restricting all civilian movement […]