The Recognition of Political Prisoners: Essential to Democratic and National Reconciliation Process

Reconciling divide on political prisoner numbers

The exact number of political prisoners in Burma has been hotly disputed over the past few months. It comes as no surprise that members of the U Thein Sein regime, such as the Presidential Advisor and Foreign Minister, dispute the numbers of political prisoners, saying estimates of political prisoners are inflated and erroneous. The burden of proof rests on the U Thein Sein regime, not the opposition, and calls for the regime to publicly disclose its prisoner lists along with evidence proving the status of each political detainee […]

Burma Army Attacks Church in Kachin State, Shooting and Torturing Worshippers

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) has today received a report from sources inside Kachin State, Burma alleging that soldiers from the Burma Army shot at worshippers in a church in Wai Maw Township two days ago […]

WLB launches a short film “Bringing Justice to Women” demanding the accountability of Burma’s military for war crimes and crimes against humanity

The Women’s League of Burma (WLB) is today launching a short film highlighting continued systematic and widespread rape against women and girls in Burma, in particular in the areas of renewed military offensives in Kachin, Karen and Shan State after so-called democratic elections […]

Burma’s Economy: Mismanagement as Usual

Contrary to the regime’s rhetoric of substantial economic reform, the Burmese economy remains hostage to the same oppressive and misguided economic policies that have stunted its development for decades.

The military continues to control the bulk of the budget, with no improvement in transparency. The regime also maintains a dual exchange rate system in order to siphon off funds into private accounts, starving the national budget of official revenue and inflating the fiscal deficit […]

ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးသံုးသပ္ခ်က္ (၃/၂၀၁၁) – ဓါးမိုး၍ ညႊတ္ကြင္းမသြင္းသင့္သည့္ ျပည္တြင္းျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ ၁၉၄၈ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇန္နဝါရီလ (၄) ရက္ေန႕တြင္ ျဗိတိသွ်နယ္ခ်ဲ႕ကိုလိုနီလက္ေအာက္မွ လြတ္လပ္ေရး ရရွိခဲ့သည္။ ထိုလြတ္လပ္ေရးႏွင့္အတူ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္မီး စတင္ေလာင္ကၽြမ္းလာခဲ့သည္။ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္မီး စတင္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ရသည့္ အေၾကာင္းရင္းကို ေလ့လာၾကည့္မည္ဆိုလွ်င္ ဝါဒေရးရာ အားျပိဳင္မႈ၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားတန္းတူေရးႏွင့္ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ျပ႒န္းခြင့္ မရွိျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း […]

State-Level Agreement with the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army – 5th Brigade

An unofficial translation of the state-level agreement between the Karen State Peace Making Group and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army – 5th Brigade (Kalo Htoo Baw).

Burma’s Continuing Human Rights Challenges

One year ago Burma conducted tightly controlled elections that transferred power from a ruling military council to a nominally civilian government in which the president and senior government officials are all former generals. In 2011 the new government has taken a number […]

Discrimination, Conflict and Corruption: The Ethnic States of Burma

Since achieving independence in January 1948, successive Burmese governments, elected and military dictatorships, have sought to address the complex issues involving the country’s many ethnic groups. They have sought to do this primarily through confronting […]

Still Imprisoned: Opium Cultivation Soars in Palaung Areas Under Burma’s New Regime

Almost one year after Burma’s long-awaited elections were held in November 2010, Palaung communities in northern Shan State are suffering from the effects of an even greater upsurge in opium cultivation than in previous years. Local paramilitary leaders, some now elected into Burma’s new parliament […]

Displacement and Poverty in South East Burma / Myanmar

A new government in Burma/Myanmar offers the possibility of national reconciliation and reform after decades of conflict. Every opportunity to resolve grievances, alleviate chronic poverty and restore justice must be seized, as there remain many obstacles to breaking […]