Linking Women and Land in Myanmar: Recognising Gender in the National Land Use Policy

The draft National Land Use Policy (NLUP) that was unveiled for public comment in October 2014 intends to create a clear national framework for managing land in Myanmar1. This is a very important step for Myanmar, given the fundamental importance of land policy for any society – particularly those with recent and complex histories of political and armed conflict and protracted displaced populations. With 70% of Myanmar’s population living and working in rural areas, agriculture is a fundamental part of the country’s social and economic fabric. The majority of these are small-holder farmers, whose land rights are currently under threat. The situation is particularly dire for the country’s ethnic minority groups, who make up an estimated 30% of the population […]

Yearning to be Heard: Mon Farmers’ Continued Struggle for Acknowledgement and Protection of their Rights

Land conflict is the most pressing issue facing Burma today, second only to armed conflict. Though Burma’s emerging democratic government has introduced land policy reform and has established land investigation commissions aimed to resolve land conflicts, civilian land acquisition by the Burmese military continues to take place, particularly in Burma’ minority ethnic areas.

The Challenge of Democratic and Inclusive Land Policymaking in Myanmar: A Response to the Draft National Land Use Policy

In October 2014 the Myanmar government unveiled a draft National Land Use Policy (NLUP) and announced it would take public comments for a limited time before finalizing the document. Once it is finalized, the new policy will determine the distribution, use and management of the country’s land and related natural resources like forests and rivers, for years to come […]

WORLD REPORT 2015

Burma

The reform process in Burma experienced significant slowdowns and in some cases reversals of basic freedoms and democratic progress in 2014. The government continued to pass laws with significant human rights limitations, failed to address calls for constitutional reform ahead of the 2015 elections, and increased arrests of peaceful critics, including land protesters and journalists […]

A Briefing by Burmese Rohingya Organization UK: International Investigation Urgently Needed into Human Rights Abuses Against the Rohingya

The Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma are the most persecuted ethnic minority in Burma, subject to policies of oppression which are applied almost exclusively to them. Government policies target Rohingya on the basis of their ethnicity and religion. The Rohingya are widely viewed in Burma as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite the fact that Rohingya people have lived in Burma for centuries […]

Statement by Karen Community Based Organizations Welcoming the Release By The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School of, “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Eastern Myanmar” It’s Time For Justice

The Karen people have suffered decades of abuse at the hands of the various forms of the Burmese dictatorship and Burmese military. We have grown up witnessing rape, murder, forced labor, destruction of villages, bombing of civilians and a wide variety of other human rights abuses. We know there are those who ordered those abuses who continue to serve in the highest levels of the Government of Burma and in the Burmese military. We live this experience. We continue to seek a full investigation and the prosecution of those responsible.

Open Letter: To President Thein Sein

December 08, 2014 President Thein Sein President’s Office Nay Pyi Taw Republic of the Union of Myanmar Re: Prosecution of Shayam Brang Shawng Dear President Thein Sein, We write to you to express our concerns about the criminal prosecution of Shayam Brang Shawng (hereinafter Brang Shawng), an ethnic Kachin resident of Sut Ngai Yang village, […]

Who Killed Ja Seng Ing?

On 13 September 2012, Shayam Ja Seng Ing, a 14 year old Kachin girl, was fatally
injured in Sut Ngai Yang village, Hpakant Township, Kachin State. Her father,
Shayam Brang Shawng, and multiple eyewitnesses allege that she was shot and
killed by Myanmar Army soldiers during a period of indiscriminate gunfire. The
Myanmar Army alleges that she was killed by a mine detonated by the Kachin
Independence Army (KIA) […]

ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ထံသုိ႔ အိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာ- Open Letter to President Thein Sein

စီးပြားေရးဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသား အားလံုးအတြက္ အဆင့္အတန္းျမင့္မားေသာ က်န္းမာေရး၊ ပညာေရးႏွင့္ ေကာင္း မြန္ေသာ အနာဂတ္မ်ားရရွိႏုိင္ရန္ ျပည္တြင္းၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးသည္ မျဖစ္မေနလုိအပ္ခ်က္ တစ္ခုျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတ ကုိယ္တုိင္ အခမ္းအနားမ်ားစြာတြင္ ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာၾကား ခဲ့ဖူးပါသည္။ […]

ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္မွဴးႀကီး မင္းေအာင္လႈိင္၊ ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္ထံသုိ႔ အိတ္ဖြင့္ေပးစာ- Open Letter to Senior General Min Aung Hlaing

တပ္မေတာ္၏ စစ္ဆင္ေရးမ်ားႏွင့္ အသစ္တစ္ဖန္ျဖစ္ပြားလ်က္ရွိေသာ ျပင္းထန္သည့္ တုိက္ခုိက္မႈမ်ားအေပၚ အမ်ားျပည္သူ အေနျဖင့္ စုိးရိမ္ပူပန္မႈႀကီးစြာ ျဖစ္လ်က္ရွိၿပီး ထုိအေျခအေနမ်ားေၾကာင့္ အမ်ဳိးသားျပန္လည္ သင့္ျမတ္ေရးႏွင့္ တပ္မေတာ္၏ အကူအညီျဖင့္ ေဆာင္ရြက္လ်က္ရွိေသာ လက္ရွိအစုိးရ၏ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲ ေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားအေပၚ ယံုၾကည္မႈကုိ မ်ားစြာ ပ်က္ျပားေစႏုိင္ပါသည္။ […]