Southeast Asia: Deadly Journeys – The Refugee and Trafficking Crisis in Southeast Asia

In May 2015 three boats carrying 1,800 women, men and children landed in Aceh, Indonesia. Most of the passengers were Muslim Rohingya, a persecuted religious and ethnic minority from Myanmar […]

Disenfranchisement and Desperation in Myanmar’s Rakhine State: Drivers of a Regional Crisis

Political exclusion is exacerbating the already intense sense of desperation among Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, and driving a regional crisis that ASEAN leaders are ill prepared to confront. Unless serious steps are taken to address the situation of deprivation and despair in Rakhine State, many Rohingya will have no other option but to flee in search of asylum elsewhere […]

Burma: International Religious Freedom Report for 2014

Muslim, Christian, and other religious minorities faced physical abuse, arbitrary arrest and detention, restrictions on religious practice and travel, and discrimination in employment and access to citizenship […]

Submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review: Myanmar

This report was originally submitted by Fortify Rights to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on March 21, 2015 for consideration in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Myanmar’s human rights performance, which will take place November 9 at the U.N. Human Rights Council […]

Freedom of Expression, Religion and Belief: As Freedom of Expression Shrinks, Discrimination is on the Rise

In the lead-up to the 2015 elections in Burma, religious minorities, especially the Muslim population, have been consistently subjected to state sponsored discrimination and violent abuse, while simultaneously denied representation in the political sphere or in civil society […]

2015 ANNI Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia

The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), as the Secretariat of the Asian NGO Network on National Human Rights Institutions (ANNI), is glad to present the 2015 ANNI Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia. Our sincere appreciation goes to all 30 ANNI member organisations from across 17 countries in Asia for their participation and commitment to ANNI and continued advocacy towards the strengthening and establishment of NHRIs in Asia. Similarly, we would also like to extend our sincere thanks to the National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) that have contributed valuable inputs and feedback to the concerned country reports […]

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။ […]

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 […]

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 […]