The country of Myanmar has been plagued by bitter experience of civil war and successive brutal regimes since the pre and post-independence era. The country gained independence from British colony in 1948 and a union of Myanmar was formed based on the principles enshrined in historic Panglong agreement signed by ethnic representatives from Kachin, Shan, Chin and Burmese. Karen and Mon started their ethnic armed struggle since pre-independence time […]
• • •Burma’s parliamentary government is headed by President Thein Sein. In 2012 the country held largely transparent and inclusive by-elections in which the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) party, chaired by Aung San Suu Kyi, won 43 of 45 contested seats of a total 664 seats in the legislature. Constitutional provisions grant one-quarter of all national and one-third of all regional and state parliamentary seats to active-duty military appointees and provide that the military indefinitely assume power over all branches of the government should the president declare a national state of emergency. The ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) continued to hold an overwhelming majority of the seats in the national parliament and state and regional assemblies, and active-duty military officers continued to wield authority at many levels of government. There is no civilian control of the military; police forces also report to the military through the minister of home affairs […]
• • •[Chiang Mai, Thailand] The Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) today condemned both the Arakan Army (AA) and the Burma Army for human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, in the context of recent outbreaks of conflict between the two sides in Paletwa, southern Chin State […]
• • •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 […]
• • •Four years ago on 9 June 2011, the Burma Army attacked the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) outpost, breaking a 17-year-old ceasefire agreement. Since then the Burma/Myanmar Government has launched an aggressive military offensive against the KIA and clashes have escalated into an outright recurrent war in Kachin and northern Shan State. As we mark the fourth anniversary of the renewed war in Kachin State, the Burma Army continues to increase its militarization by manipulating its forces into ethnic administrated territories, while the Government has restricted local and international humanitarian access to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), obstructing the delivery of adequate aid and assistance […]
• • •An estimated 63,000 people are believed to have traveled by boat in an irregular and dangerous way in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea in 2014. Another 25,000 joined them in the first quarter of 2015. They are part of a complex, mixed migratory movement composed of refugees, stateless people and economic migrants. Unregulated and, until recently, inconspicuous, the scale of the movement has tripled since 2012 and the level and scale of abuse suffered by voyagers is unprecedented in recent times.
• • •Moulmein, Mon State: At a presentation in Mon State capital Moulmein, the Women and Child Rights Project (WCRP), a project of the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM) released a report entitled “Inaccessible and Under-Resourced: Concerns Over Education in Rural Mon Communities” […]
• • •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 […]
• • •ျ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 […]
• • •Since 2011, Myanmar has undergone far-reaching changes that have affected many aspects of life in the country. However, there continue to be signs of backtracking by the Government and increasing concerns over discrimination and ethnic conflict […]
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