Burma Briefing No. 3: Burma’s nuclear programme could be bad news for human rights

Rather than persuade the international community to finally take action against Burma’s generals, recent evidence of Burma’s nuclear programme could be bad news for human rights, diverting international attention away from human rights, and turning the focus to disarmament […]

Upholding the Responsibility to Protect in Burma/Myanmar

Introduction

The situation in Burma/Myanmar remains grave. With elections scheduled for 7 November 2010 international attention on the country has increased. Such attention, and any policy action taken, must focus not only on the goal of democratic transition, and concerns about the regimes nuclear collaboration with North Korea, but also on the plight of Burma’s ethnic minorities who continue to suffer atrocities at the hands of the government. These atrocities may rise to the level of crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing – crimes states committed themselves to protect populations from at the 2005 World Summit, as described in the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect policy brief dated 4 March 2010, “Applying the Responsibility to Protect to Burma/Myanmar[…]

Burma Briefing No. 2: The United Nations General Assembly & Burma

This briefing calls on the United Nations General Assembly to establish a Commission of Inquiry into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Burma. EU Member states are currently drafting the twentieth annual resolution on Burma, which is expected to be adopted later this year […]

Burma Briefing No. 1: Burma’s transition to civilian dictatorship

A new commentary on Burma’s elections by Burma Campaign UK.

The key points of this week’s briefing are:

• Burma’s ‘elections’ will not bring the kind of change needed in Burma.
• Calls for free and fair elections miss the point. The Constitution enshrines civilian dictatorship […]

Monthly Chronology of Burma’s Political Prisoners in Burma –July 2010

Summary of current situation

There are a total of 2,174 political prisoners in Burma. This is an overall increase of 3 in comparison to last month’s figure of 2,171. In July, 2 political prisoners were arrested, and 4 were released. This retroactive information explains why there is actually an overall increase of 3 this month.

Since the protests in August 2007, leading to September’s Saffron Revolution, a total of 1,169 activists have been arrested and are still in detention[…]

Weekly Political Events Regarding the SPDC’s Election (028/2010)

In this week’s report , you will find:

* USDP party members and residents stated that USDP organizers in Yenanchaung Township, Magwe Division, were provided with funds to run a money lending business as a means to recruit more members.
ယခုအပတ္ NDD ၏သတင္းမွတ္တမ္းတြင္ –

* ေရနံေခ်ာင္းျမိဳ႕တြင္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုၾက႔ံခုိင္ေရးႏွင္႔ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးပါတီ USDP ကပါတီစည္းရုံးေရး လုပ္ငန္းတစ္ခုအေနျဖင္႔ စည္းရုံးေရးမႈးမ်ားအား ေငြေခ်းလုပ္ငန္းလုပ္ကိုင္ရန္ အရင္းအႏွီးထုတ္ေပးေနသည္ဟု ပါတီဝန္မ်ားႏွင္႔ေဒသခံမ်ားက ေျပာသည္[…]

“ဦး၀င္းတင္နဲ႔ ေမးခြန္းမ်ား” အီးဘြတ္ ၈၈ အေရးေတာ္ပုံ ၂၂ ႏွစ္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္အျဖစ္ မိုးမခက ျဖန္႔ခ်ိ

စစ္အစုိးရ အလိုက် ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၊ NLD ပါတီ၏ ရပ္တည္ျဖတ္သန္းမႈႏွင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္အေရး အင္တာဗ်ဴးမ်ား စုစည္းတင္ဆက္ခ်က္ ဆိုတဲ့ ေခါင္းစဥ္နဲ႔ မိုးမခက ဦး၀င္းတင္နဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဆုံေမးျမန္းျခင္း အင္တာဗ်ဴးေဆာင္းပါးမ်ားကို တစုတစည္းတည္း အီးဘြတ္အျဖစ္ ထုတ္ေ၀လိုက္ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္ဒီမိုကေရစီအေရး ၈ ေလးလုံး အေရးေတာ္ပုံၾကီးရဲ့ ၂၂ ႏွစ္ျပည့္မွာ အမွတ္တရ အေလးျပဳျပီး ထုတ္ေ၀တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။လက္ရွိ ၂၀၁၀ စစ္အစိုးရေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အရႈပ္အေထြးကာလမွာ ဆရာဦး၀င္းတင္ရဲ့ ျပတ္သားတဲ့ အေတြးအျမင္၊ အင္န္အယ္ဒီပါတီရဲ့ ၂၀၁၀ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအၾကပ္အတည္းကို မည္သုိ႔ တစုတစည္းတည္း ရင္ဆိုင္ျဖတ္သန္းပုံနဲ႔ ၾကံဳေတြ႔ရုန္းကန္ရမႈေတြကို သည္အင္တာဗ်ဴးမွတ္တမ္းကေန သမိုင္းစာမ်က္ႏွာအျဖစ္ ေမာ္ကြန္းထိုးတဲ့အေနနဲ႔ မိုးမခစာနယ္ဇင္းအဖြဲ႔က ၾကိဳးပမ္းတင္ဆက္လိုက္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

From Coup d’état to ‘Disciplined Democracy’: The Burmese Regime’s Claims to Legitimacy

Executive Summary

Burma (Myanmar) has experienced continuous military rule for almost half a century. During this time, the armed forces (Tatmadaw) have developed a series of claims aimed to legitimize their continued ruling of the country. Political legitimacy in Burma can be examined historically, through different periods of rule, or by themes and the transitions from one source of legitimacy to another. This paper will blend the historical and thematic as it concentrates on the sources of legitimacy relied upon by the Tatmadaw since it first came to power. In addition, the paper will discuss the foreign perceptions of legitimacy and influences that the international community have had on the regime’s search for legitimacy in recent years[…]

Civil-Military Relations in Burma: Portents, Predictions and Possibilities

Executive Summary

Burma boasts the world’s most durable military dictatorship, but civil-military relations in the country have never been static. Until 1988, a distinction seems to have been made between the military government, which was generally held in low esteem, and the armed forces as an institution, which was more widely respected. Over the past 20 years, however, popular attitudes toward both have deteriorated markedly. Among the civilian population, the standing of both the armed forces and the regime are now as low as they have ever been. This seems likely to remain the case for years to come.[…]

Burma’s 2010 Electoral Framework: Fundamentally Undemocratic – A Legal and Human Rights Analysis

This study draws on contributions from numerous experts in the region and comparative election, constitutional and human rights law. Since 1995, NDI has worked with partners to advance the cause of democracy in Burma. The 2010 elections in theory could have provided an opportunity to advance democratic progress and national reconciliation, which in turn could have helped significantly improve the lives of people in Burma. Based on its analysis, NDI came to the conclusion shared by many experts that the election process will not be a step forward and risks being yet another setback […]