Key Messages to World Leaders, International Governments and the UN Concerns and Requests Related to Humanitarian Situation in Kachin and Northern Shan States, Myanmar

The 25thASEAN Summit is commencing from 11 to 13 November 2014, hosted by Myanmar in its capital, Naypyi Taw. Most prominent world leaders are gathering and discussing important matters affecting the ASEAN countries and, inevitably, the interconnected global arena. On this occasion, Joint Strategy Team for Kachin Humanitarian Response would like to urge the world leaders, international governments and the UN to pay attention to the following concerns and take immediate actions to fulfill the requests. We firmly believe that the world leaders, international governments and the UN will strongly support the protection of dignity and rights of the internally displaced persons […]

Burma: Religious Freedom and Related Human Rights Violations are Hindering Broader Reforms

Executive Summary

The dramatic political developments in Burma in recent years are of historical and geopolitical significance. Bur-ma has progressed much further than most might have imagined possible only a few short years ago. Despite these achievements, Burma still has a long journey along the road to democracy and respect for human rights. Serious violations of religious freedom and human rights continue, accompanied by disturbing evidence of prejudice and intolerance, trends that will inevitably and dramatically impact the prospects for a brighter future. In short, the political reform process in Burma is at great risk of deteriorating if religious freedom and the right to equal treatment under the law are not honored and protected. […]

Legal Memorandum: War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Eastern Myanmar

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In January 2011, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic (“the Clinic”) began to investigate the actions of the Myanmar Army during a military offensive in eastern Myanmar (“the Offensive”) that began in late 2005 and lasted approximately three years. The Clinic sought to determine whether violations of international criminal law occurred during the Offensive, and whether there exist reasonable grounds to assert that individual military officers could be held responsible for those crimes. The Clinic’s investigation focused specifically on the conduct of two military units—Southern Regional Military Command (“Southern Command”) and Light Infantry Division 66 (“LID 66”)—in Thandaung Township, Kayin State. […]

Protection and Security Concerns in South East Burma/ Myanmar

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The peace process in Burma/Myanmar1 is at a critical juncture from which it could evolve into a transformative national dialogue or splinter into a divisive charade. While hopes for substantive and inclusive discussion about structural injustice remain, ongoing militarisation and attacks by the national armed forces2 are undermining the confidence of ethnic stakeholders. This report seeks to highlight the protection and security concerns of conflict-affected communities. […]

Afraid to Go Home: Recent Violent Conflict and Human Rights Abuses in Karen State

Introduction

The following report was prepared by Karen Rivers Watch (KRW), a coalition of six Karen organizations focused on the environment, women, youth, human rights and development issues. More information about KRW is provided on page 14.

This report is based on field interviews with local villagers and leaders of Karen armed groups, as well as media coverage of the recent conflict. It describes events that led to recent armed conflict between the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) and the combined force of the Burmese Army (BA) and Border Guard Force (BGF) in Karen State. Next, the report gives a detailed account of clashes that occurred along the Salween River in Hpa-an and Hpapun (Mutraw) districts. […]

Open Letter from Karen Human Rights Group to President Obama

The Karen Human Rights Group would like to call your attention to human rights violations that have resulted from the ongoing government military presence throughout Southeast Myanmar […]

Fortify Rights Briefing and Recommendations: November 6, 2014

In ongoing fighting in Kachin State and northern Shan State, the Myanmar Army has targeted and attacked civilians and non-military targets, and killed civilians with impunity.

For instance, in October 2011, the Myanmar Army entered Hka Wan Bang village, Kachin State following nearby clashes with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Soldiers detained and tortured three local men suspected of involvement with the KIA, two of whom spoke to Fortify Rights. Myanmar Army soldiers detained “Doi Seng,” a 27-year-old Kachin man, along with two other Kachin men and then shot and killed an unarmed Shan civilian man on a motorbike […]

Myanmar: Further Information: Activist Organization Targeted again

Two members of the Movement for Democracy Current Force (MDCF) have been given jail terms for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. They must be immediately and unconditionally released. Charges against a third person, who is married to one of the MDCF members and was exercising her right to peaceful protest, should be dropped […]

“ဘိန္းႏြံတြင္းက ငိုရႈိက္သံ” အစီရင္ခံစာ

နိဒါန္း

၁၈၈၆ တြင္ အထက္ျမန္မာျပည္ကို အဂၤလိပ္တို႔ သိမ္းပိုက္ၿပီးေနာက္ တရုတ္-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ တေလ်ာက္တြင္ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ၌ ဘိန္းစိုက္ပ်ဳိးထုတ္လုပ္မႈ စတင္ ထြန္းကား ရာေဒသ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့ သည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ ၁၉၄၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အဂၤလိပ္တို႔ ထံမွ လြတ္လပ္ေရး ရရွိခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္မွ ဘိန္းစိုက္ပ်ဳိး ထုတ္လုပ္ မႈသည္ အနာဂတ္တြင္ ျပႆနာမ်ားျဖစ္ထြန္းမႈ ပိုမိုႀကီးထြား လာေစသည့္ မ်ဳိးေစ့မ်ားကို ခ်ထားၿပီး ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ […]

Burmese Government Urged to Investigate the Enforced Disappearance of Sumlut Roi Ja

On the third anniversary of the abduction of Sumlut Roi Ja, an ethnic Kachin woman from Burma, we, the undersigned organizations, call on the Burmese government to thoroughly investigate her enforced disappearance and hold the perpetrators accountable […]