Human rights violations by Second Lieutenant Tha Beh of BGF Battalion #1014 in Hpapun District, between 2012 and 2015

This News Bulletin describes forced labour, violent abuse, threats, arbitrary taxation and demands, and fighting committed by Second Lieutenant Tha Beh of Border Guard Force (BGF) Battalion #1014 between 2012 and 2015. Second Lieutenant Tha Beh has committed numerous human rights violations in the regions under his influence, such as A—, B—, and C— areas, in Pa Zwun Myaung village tract, Bu Tho Township, Hpapun District. On January 13th 2014, Second Lieutenant Tha Beh violently abused a villager from G— village, Bu Tho Township for logging without paying him a tax, resulting in the villager’s arm being broken. Second Lieutenant Tha Beh also fined the villager 300,000 kyat (US $257.07) after the abuse […]

Fighting between Tatmadaw and DKBA soldiers along the Asian Highway displaces villagers in Dooplaya District, July 2015

This News Bulletin describes the displacement of villagers in Kawkareik Township, Dooplaya District as a result of fighting that took place during July 2015 between Tatmadaw and Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) soldiers over control of a recently completed section of the Asian Highway […]

FBR’s relationship with the Burma Government and an Assessment of the Current Situation in Burma

The situation in Burma is changing, in some case for the better and in others for the worse. In the midst of this FBR continues its mission of giving help, hope and love and putting a light on the situation. In areas where there have been improvements, such as parts of Karen State, some of […]

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူမ်ားကို ဘယ္လိုကာကြယ္ေပးမလဲ ။

(ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ -၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔) ျမန္မာအစုိးရအေနျဖင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူမ်ားအား ပစ္မွတ္ထား ဖိႏွိပ္ျခင္း၊ ခ်ဳပ္ျခယ္ျခင္း၊ ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ဖြင့္ဟထုတ္ေဖာ္ ျခင္း မျပဳႏုိင္ဘဲ အသံတိတ္သြားေစရန္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနျခင္းမ်ားအား အျမန္ဆံုးရပ္တန္႔ရမည့္အျပင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူ (HRD) မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ၎တုိ႔၏ တန္ဖုိးရွိၿပီး တရား၀င္မႈရွိေသာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား အႏၱရာယ္ကင္းကင္း ဆက္လက္ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္ေစရန္ ဥပေဒႏွင့္ တရားစီရင္ေရး ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ယႏၱရားမ်ား အားေကာင္းလာေစေရး မျဖစ္မေနေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္လည္း လုိအပ္သည္ဟု ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ေအေအပီပီ)ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့အေရး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ား (BP) တုိ႔မွ ၎တို႔ယေန႔ပူးတဲြထုတ္ေ၀ေသာ အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ ေျပာဆုိလုိက္ပါသည္။ […]

Recent Fighting between Tatmadaw and DKBA Soldiers Leads to Killing and Displacement of Villagers in Hpa-an District

On July 8th 2015, a female villager named Naw D—, from G— village, reported to KHRG that on the evening of July 6th 2015, Tatmadaw soldiers began firing small machine guns and grenade launchers at the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA)[2]camp in Waw Poo Bridge area, Meh Th’Waw village. Villagers who live in the villages near the location where the fighting took place have fled from their villages for their own safety […]

Presidential Amnesty does little to Liberate Burma’s Political Prisoners

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) and the Former Political Prisoners Society (FPPS) are greatly disappointed at the release of only a handful of political prisoners yesterday, among thousands of criminal offenders set free in the amnesty […]

Myanmar: Stalled reforms: impunity, discrimination and ongoing human rights abuses: Amnesty International Submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review, November 2015

This report was originally prepared as a submission for the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Myanmar due to take place in November 2015 […]

Land and River Grabbing: The Mekong’s Greatest Challenge

07-Land-and-River-Grabbing-2015 sm Throughout the Mekong region, large-scale development projects such as hydropower dams, mines, conventional power plants, and mono-crop plantations are displacing communities and limiting access to natural resources. Several hydropower dams have already been built on the Upper Mekong in China’s Yunnan Province, and the governments of Cambodia, Laos and Thailand are planning eleven additional large dams on the Mekong River’s mainstream. If completed, these dams would not only destroy local ecosystems, but also reduce the fl ow of silt throughout the Mekong River system, and block major fi sh migrations, placing at risk over sixty million people who depend on the Mekong for their food security and income […]

Trafficking in Persons Report 2015

BURMA: Tier 2 Watch List

Burma is a source country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and for women and children subjected to sex trafficking. Some Burmese men, women, and children who migrate for work abroad—particularly to Thailand and China, as well as ther countries in Asia, the Middle East, and the United States—are subjected to forced labor or sex trafficking. Men are subjected to forced labor in the fishing, manufacturing, forestry, and construction industries abroad, while women and girls are primarily subjected to sex trafficking, domestic servitude, or forced labor in garment manufacturing. NGOs report an increase in the number of Burmese males transiting Thailand en route to Indonesia and Malaysia, where they are subsequently subjected to forced labor, primarily in the fishing industry. Some Burmese men in the Thai fishing industry are subjected to debt bondage, passport confiscation, or fraudulent recruitment; some are also subjected to physical abuse and forced to remain aboard vessels in international waters for years. Reports indicate some Rohingya asylum seekers transiting Thailand en route to Malaysia are sold into forced labor on Thai fishing boats, reportedly with the assistance of Thai civilian and military officials. Burmese women are transported to China and subjected to sex trafficking and domestic servitude through forced marriages to Chinese men; Burmese government officials are reportedly occasionally complicit in this form of trafficking […]

Report Briefer: How to Defend the Defenders? A Report on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders in Burma and Appropriate Protection Mechanisms

Testimonies and reports from inside the country have painted a very different picture to the new tolerant and free Burma that the Burma Government wants the world to see. Those who try to defend human rights, or question the power or narrative of the Burma Government — and their military and corporate backers —now seem to be operating in as dangerous an environment as ever […]