Burma in the Balance: The Role of Foreign Assistance in Supporting Burma’s Democratic Transition

The historic constraints on donor interventions in Burma—whether self-imposed sanctions or regime-imposed barriers—are increasingly giving way to a sense of heightened optimism about the possibilities of working on issues across the development spectrum. But while the terrain appears to be improving, there remain substantial barriers to effective programming beyond the overall pace and scope of political reform […]

Burma’s Resource Curse: The Case for Revenue Transparency in the Oil and Gas Sector

Burma is rich in natural resources, particularly natural gas and oil. Yet instead of using these resources for the country’s development through industry and job growth, military leaders have been exporting them for over a decade […]

Untold Miseries: Wartime Abuses and Forced Displacement in Kachin State

In his March 2011 inauguration speech, Burmese President Thein Sein emphasized the importance of ending Burma’s several ethnic armed conflicts, declaring that more than 60 years of ethnic warfare in Burma were due to “dogmatism, sectarian strife, and racism.” Burma’s ethnic minorities had, he said […]

The Use of Rape as a Weapon of War in Burma’s Ethnic Areas

With a population of over 50 million people, Burma is comprised of eight major ethnic nationalities: Burman, Shan, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Chin, Kachin and Arakan. Burma’s ethnic groups demand equality, autonomy […]

Progress Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar

The recent wave of reforms has had a positive impact on the situation of human rights in Myanmar. The upcoming by-elections on 1 April 2012 will be a key test of how far the Government has progressed in its reform process. There is, however, a risk of backtracking on the progress achieved to date. At this crucial moment in the country’s history, remaining human rights concerns and challenges should be addressed, and justice and accountability measures, as well as measures to ensure access to the truth, should be taken […]

Activities of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (5 September 2011 to 31 January 2012)

This report details the activities of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission since it’s creation on 5 September 2011 until 31 January 2012. The report includes details on the formation of the commission and its members, the mandate of the commission, the funding and the functioning of the commission. It also provides information on the handling of complaints, statements and other activities of the commission […]

လယ္ယာေျမ အဓၶမသိမ္းယူမႈ မ်ားႏွင့္ေအာင္ပြဲအပိုင္းအစမ်ား

The Farmers’ Rights Defenders Network, a Burma-based rights group, has released a new publication documenting and recounting the courageous fight against land expropriation, intimidation and false prosecution of a group of rural villagers […]

ဤအစီရင္ခံစာသည္ မေကြးတိုင္းေဒသၾကီး၊ သရက္ခရိုင္၊ ကံမျမိဳ႕နယ္၊ စစၥရံေက်းရြာရွိ ရိုးသားစြာ လုပ္ကိုင္စားေသာက္ေသာ လယ္သမားမ်ား မတရားမႈမ်ားကို မိမိတို႕၏ စုစည္းမႈအားျဖင့္ တြန္းလွန္၍ တရားမွ်တမႈကို ရွာေဖြတိုက္ပြဲဝင္ခဲ့ၾကသည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္တခုအား […]

Burma’s NHRC: An Empty Gesture (updated version)

The international community should not welcome the creation of Burma’s NHRC until it complies with the Paris Principles

On 5 September, Burma’s regime announced that it had established a National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) charged with promoting and safeguarding the fundamental rights of citizens in accordance with the 2008 Constitution.

While the creation of a NHRC could be seen as a positive step, it should be welcomed with skepticism […]

Leaflet on Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes

This leaflet explains in very simple terms what are crimes against humanity and war crimes, including targeted attacks against civilians, deportation or forcible transfer of population, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, enslavement and enforced disappearance of persons.

Individuals and solidarity organizations are welcome to print and distribute this leaflet to raise public awareness about the ongoing crimes being committed in Burma […]

All the information I’ve given you, I faced it myself: Rural testimony on abuse in eastern Burma since November 2010

Human rights abuses faced by ethnic communities across rural eastern Burma have continued since November 2010, and are consistent with patterns KHRG has documented since 1992. Drawing from a dataset of 1,270 oral testimonies, sets of images and documentation […]