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Displacement (184 found)
‘With Only Our Voices, What Can We Do?’: Land Confiscation and Local Response in Southeast Myanmar
ORCHID HOTEL, YANGON – Three years after the 2012 preliminary ceasefire negotiations between the Myanmar government and the Karen National Union (KNU), reported instances of land confiscation continue to increase in southeast Myanmar. In the 2015 report, ‘With only our voices, what can we do?’, KHRG highlights four main land use types which lead to land confiscation, including infrastructure projects, natural resource extraction, commercial agriculture projects, and military activities. Based on testimony from local villagers, the Myanmar government; domestic corporate actors; and Tatmadaw and Karen ethnic armed groups (EAGs) are all identified as being complicit in the confiscation of land from local communities in southeast Myanmar. However, local villagers report using a variety of strategies to prevent and mitigate the impacts of land confiscation, such as reaching out to civil society organisations (CSOs) and the media, negotiating with actors involved in projects, and lobbying both the Myanmar government and Karen EAGs […]
Stateless At Sea: The Moken of Burma and Thailand
The 25-page report, “Stateless at Sea: The Moken of Burma and Thailand,” describes in words and photographs serious violations of the rights of the Moken by state authorities – particularly the Burmese navy – including extortion, bribery, arbitrary arrest, and confiscation of property. Human Rights Watch also examines tightening immigration and maritime conservation laws that threaten their freedom of movement and traditional lifestyle. Most Moken are stateless, making them extremely vulnerable to human rights abuse and depriving them of access to medical care, education, and employment opportunities.
Burma 2014 Human Rights Report
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 […]
• • •The Intersection of HADR and the Rohingya Refugee Crisis
Now that Indonesia and Malaysia have agreed to provide temporary refuge for Rohingya refugees, the recent humanitarian crisis is moving toward a longer term relief and resettlement operation. But the sequence of events leading up to the short-term relief operation demonstrated serious limitations in how regional actors respond to politically sensitive humanitarian challenges. The actions and words of Burma and the other ASEAN countries, as well as those of the United States, are important indicators of the current state of multilateral organizations, international law, and the support of human dignity. Most notably, the Rohingya refugee crisis should be used to shift the debate on the future of Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) exercises between the United States and its allies […]
• • •ဒုကၡသည္တို႔၏အသံ – ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္ရွိ ျမန္မာ့ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအေျခအေန
(၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လ ၁၀ရက္) ယေန႕တြင္ Burma Link ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့အေရးပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ား တို႕မွ ဒုကၡသည္တို႔၏အသံ – ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္ရွိ ျမန္မာ့ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား အေျခအေန ဟုအမည္ရွိသည့္ စာတမ္း အက်ဥ္းတစ္ေစာင္ကို ျမန္မာဘာသာျဖင့္ အင္တာနက္စာမ်က္ႏွာေပၚသို႔ ပူးတြဲထုတ္ေ၀တင္ျပထားပါသည္။ ထိုစာတမ္း တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ကာလအတြင္း ဒုကၡသည္တို႔၏အသံမ်ား ဆက္လက္လ်စ္လ်ဴရႈခံ ေနရဆဲျဖစ္သည္ကို အဓိကထား ေရးသားေဖာ္ျပထားပါသည္။ […]
• • •On World Refugee Day Burma Government and International Community Must Commit to Respecting Voices and Rights of Burma’s Refugees
(20 June, 2015) On this 2015 World Refugee Day, we stand in solidarity with the over 110,000 refugees who fled Burma to seek protection in the nine camps along the Thailand-Burma border, embodying the years of conflict and the struggle for democracy […] ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႕တြင္ က်ေရာက္သည့္ ကမၻာ့ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားေန႔တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ထြက္ေျပးလာၿပီး ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္ရွိ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္း (၉) ခု၌ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္မႈခံယူေနေသာ ဒုကၡသည္ ၁၁၀,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ႏွင့္ အတူ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ ေသြးစည္းညီၫြတ္စြာ ရပ္တည္ေနပါသည္။ ယင္းဒုကၡသည္မ်ားမွာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ၾကာေညာင္းေနၿပီျဖစ္သည့္ စစ္ပြဲ ႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးတိုက္ပြဲကို ထင္ဟပ္ေနပါသည္။ ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔သည္ ကုလသမဂၢဒုကၡသည္မ်ားဆိုင္ရာမဟာမင္းႀကီး (UNHCR)၊ ျမန္မာအစိုးရ၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအလႉရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ သက္ဆိုင္သူအားလံုးတို႕ကို ၁၉၅၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဒုကၡသည္အဆင့္အတန္းဆိုင္ရာ ကြန္ဗင္း ရွင္းသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ႏွင့္ ၁၉၆၇ ခုႏွစ္ ဒုကၡသည္အဆင့္အတန္းဆိုင္ရာ လုပ္ထံုးလုပ္နည္းတို႔အား ေလးစားလိုက္နာရန္ႏွင့္ ဒုကၡသည္အားလံုး၏ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင့္ေရွာက္အားေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါသည္။ […]
• • •Major Conflict Ongoing in Northern Burma – Reported Military Actions by the Burma Army in Kachin and Northern Shan States April/May 2015
Despite talks of a ceasefire, heavy and escalating fighting has been occurring throughout Northern Burma in the last two months. This report is a summary of this fighting; a more detailed daily analysis of events is available on request. Because this report uses only FBR reports and not those of other sources, it does not represent a totality of events; actual totals may be much higher […]
• • •Thematic Briefing: Armed conflict in Paletwa, southern Chin State
[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 […]
• • •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 […]
An Open Letter to World Leaders on the Fourth Anniversary of The Resumption of War Calling Urgently for Humanitarian Aid for The Internally Displaced People of Northern Burma
On this fourth anniversary of the resumption of war against the Kachin people, the undersigned organisations call upon world leaders to strengthen their commitment to promoting peace and saving the lives, dignity and well-being of the Infernally […]
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