“I Want to Help My Own People”

State Control and Civil Society in Burma after Cyclone Nargis

This 102-page report based on 135 interviews with cyclone survivors, aid workers, and other eyewitnesses, details the Burmese military government’s response to Nargis and its implications for human rights and development in Burma today. The report describes the government’s attempts to block assistance in the desperate three weeks after the cyclone […]

Monthly Chronology – March 2010

There are a total of 2,186 political prisoners in Burma, an overall increase in comparison to last month’s figure of 2,185. In March, 3 activists were arrested and 3 political prisoners were released […]

The Role of Political Prisoners in the National Reconciliation Process

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

For decades, the people of Burma have been striving for peace, democracy and the full realization of their human rights. Recognizing this goal, political parties like the National League for Democracy (NLD) and ethnic nationality groups have attempted to engage in a process of national reconciliation, but the ruling military regime (known as the State Peace and Development Council, SPDC) has resisted this at every turn. At its heart, ‘national reconciliation’ is resolution of the conflicts brought about by the struggle for democracy, human rights, equality, and self-determination that have been ongoing since independence. Burma’s 2,100 plus political prisoners represent that struggle, yet the SPDC continues to deny their existence.[…]

2009 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Burma

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

Burma, with an estimated population of 54 million, is ruled by a highly authoritarian military regime dominated by the majority ethnic Burman group. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), led by Senior General Than Shwe, was the country’s de facto government. Military officers wielded the ultimate authority at each level of government. […]

Burma’s Women Political Prisoners

An 8-page briefer on women political prisoners in Burma, illustrating that women from all across the country and from various sectors of society are imprisoned for their political beliefs. According to Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – Burma (AAPP) there are presently 177 women political prisoners across Burma. […]

အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား အခြင့္အေရး ေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္

အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားအေနျဖင္႔ ေအာက္ပါအခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို သက္ဆုိင္ရာေထာင္အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားထံသုိ႔ ၁ရ.၂.၂၀၁၀ ေန႔မွစ၍ ေတာင္းဆုိလုိက္သည္။ ၁။ သတင္းစာအပါအဝင္ စာေပဖတ္ရႈခြင့္ ျပည့္ျပည့္ဝဝရရွိေရး ၂။ က်န္းမာေရး ေစာင္႔ေရွာက္မႈ ျပည့္ျပည့္ဝဝရရွိေရး ၃။ အက်ဥ္းသားအားလုံး ပိုမုိေကာင္းမြန္ေသာ အစားအေသာက္ရရွိေရး ၄။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား အေဆာင္ပရဝုဏ္အတြင္း ေထာင္ပိ္တ္ခ်ိန္မွအပ အခ်ိန္ျပည့္သြားလာႏုိင္ေရး ၅။ စာေပ ေရးသားေလ့က်င့္ခြင့္ ရရွိေရး။ ေတာင္းဆုိရသည္႔အေၾကာင္းအရင္းမ်ား အခ်က္ ၁။ ။ သြင္းပို႔ေသာ စာအုပ္၊ မဂၢဇင္း၊ ဂ်ာနယ္ စသည္မ်ားကို တပါတ္၊ ဆယ္ရက္ၾကာမွ် ၾက့ံၾကာျခင္း၊ စာအုပ္မ်ားတြင္ ဆုတ္ၿဖဲပယ္ဖ်က္ျခင္း၊ ျဖတ္ေတာက္ျခင္း၊ သတင္းစာပုံမွန္မရရွိျခင္း၊ တခါတရံ လုံးဝမရျခင္း၊ ၂ရက္၃ရက္ၾကာမွ ရရွိျခင္း။ အခ်က္ ၂။ ။ ေသာက္ေဆး၊ ထုိးေဆး လုံေလာက္စြာမရျခင္း၊ ဆရာဝန္ႏွင့္ေတြ႔ရန္ ခက္ခဲၾက့ံၾကာျခင္း။ […]

Letter from Insein Prison: Demands for Prisoner’s Rights

We, as prisoners, demand the following rights to the authorities: To read books including news papers To get proper medical treatment To get better foods for all prisoners To be free to go out of our  cell in our compound, except during closing time of the prison To write and have access to paper and […]

The Repression of Ethnic Minority Activists in Myanmar

The 58-page report, The Repression of Ethnic Minority Activists in Myanmar, draws on accounts from more than 700 activists from the seven largest ethnic minorities, including the Rakhine, Shan, Kachin, and Chin, covering a two-year period from August 2007.

The authorities have arrested, imprisoned, and in some cases tortured or even killed ethnic minority activists. Minority groups have also faced extensive surveillance, harassment and discrimination when trying to carry out their legitimate activities. […]

US Congressman Van Hollen Statement on Nyi Nyi Aung

Today Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) issued the following statement on Nyi Nyi Aung, a Burmese American citizen and Eighth District constituent, who was sentenced yesterday by the government of Burma to three years of hard labor: “This sentence is the latest in a string of unjust and abusive actions by Burma’s military led government […]

Burma’s prisons and labour camps: Silent killing fields

Outlines the health impact of systematic torture, long-term imprisonment, transfers to remote prisons, and denial of healthcare on the country’s pro-democracy activists. Download the Report Here