The FCO’s Human Rights Work 2013

Summary

In this report, we examine the 2013 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Report on Human Rights and Democracy (2013 Report), and highlight some areas of particular concern. Promoting human rights should be a foreign policy priority, but for this to be meaningful, we believe that the Department would benefit from the establishment of clearly defined objectives and benchmarks to measure the outcomes of all of its human rights policies, and further prominence being given to these in the Report.

Countries of concern

The FCO designated 28 countries of concern in its 2013 report, where it judged the gravity of the human rights abuses to be so severe that a particular focus should be applied. We have concentrated our attention on three of these countries: Sri Lanka, Burma, and Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Favourable trade concessions to the EU market should be removed from Sri Lanka if the Government of Sri Lanka continues to deny the OHCHR investigation team access into the country. The Government should advocate re-imposition of sanctions by the EU if there is no improvement in the human rights situation in Burma. The human rights of Israeli, Palestinian and Bedouin citizens living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories continue to be of serious concern to the UK. […]

ႏုိ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။ […]

Urgent Release: The Humanitarian Crisis Update and Key Messages for Kachin State and Northern Shan State

The Joint Strategy Team for Humanitarian Response in Kahcin and Northern Shan State would like to raise concerns over the recent increases of clashes and military actions near Laiza where over 17,000 IDPs are taking shelters in 4 camps. JST would like to request your urgent action and support for the safety and protection of the IDPs as well as ensuring unhindered and continuing humanitarian assistance for the IDPs in the KIO control area. […]

‘If they had hope, they would speak’: The Ongoing Use of State-Sponsored Sexual Violence in Burma’s Ethnic Communities

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In January 2014, the Women’s League of Burma (WLB) published a report which demonstrated the systematic use of rape by the Burma Army as a strategy to subjugate communities across the country. We documented over a hundred cases of sexual violence in the years since President Thein Sein took office – a number which we believe grossly underestimates the true scale of the problem. Drawing on evidence gathered by our member organisations across Burma, we argued that there are clear links between militarisation, investment and human rights abuses. We also proposed a number of steps to uproot the culture of impunity which surrounds sexual violence, and prevents survivors from obtaining justice. Whilst recent months have seen positive action taken in several areas, the pillars which provide impunity for perpetrators of human rights abuses remain in place. In January, we called for constitutional reform to place the military under civilian control; the establishment of effective judicial and non-judicial mechanisms to investigate human rights abuses, particularly those relating to sexual violence, and; greater participation of women in the peace process dialogue. […]

Myanmar 2014: Civic Knowledge and Values in a Changing Society

After decades of military rule and isolation, a new Asia Foundation survey shows Myanmar’s citizens are hopeful about the future – on elections, respondents say they believe in exercising their right to vote: 77 percent say that voting can lead to improvements in the future, just 10 percent say things will not change no matter how one votes. But this optimism is tempered by challenges that remain. The findings reveal limited knowledge among the public about government institutions and their functions, low level of social trust, a high degree of political polarization, and deep apprehension about economic opportunities.

Open Letter to Mr. Barack Obama President of United States of America

We are writing to you to inform you about current situation in Myanmar and the reality on the ground from the perspective of young people. Allow us to get straight to what we want you to know. Current reform in Myanmar is fake. Changes that have happened are cosmetic to please the international community to attract investments to get the old regime out of economic isolation. We do not believe this reform process is going to take us anywhere because the motivation for reform is insincere. We want genuine democracy and national reconciliation […]

Myanmar: A Tipping Point for Rohingya Rights?

Two years after a wave of violence hit the region, Myanmar’s Rakhine State has become a segregated zone. Two million ethnic Rakhine live apart from 1.2 million stateless Rohingya, who are trapped inside displacement camps or barred from leaving their villages. Ending this segregation and protecting the rights of the Rohingya are necessary components of Myanmar’s move toward democracy. However, the Rakhine leadership has rejected – both politically and with force – any reintegration of the two communities, and it is seeking to exclude the Rohingya from any role in the state’s development, distribution of resources, and political representation. […]

Statement by Shan Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to US President Barack Obama

We, Shan community based organisations, deplore the large-scale offensive that the Burma Army has been conducting in central Shan State since June 2014, which is in violation of an existing ceasefire agreement and completely negates the Burmese government’s claims to be building nationwide peace. We urge President Obama to publicly raise concerns about this offensive with President Thein Sein during his visit to Naypyidaw, and to call for the Burmese government to immediately end its military operations and begin political dialogue to end the civil war. […]

Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama,

We are writing on behalf of Kachin Society from Myanmar and abroad, composed of (27) organizations and networks.

We would like to welcome your administration’s courageous step in engaging with the Myanmar government, including your visit in 2012 and your delivery of the important speech at the University of Yangon. It resonates with us to this day. […]