Fighting between Tatmadaw and KNLA soldiers leads to violent abuse and displacement of villagers in Bu Tho Township, Hpapun District, October 2015

This News Bulletin describes three separate incidents of fighting that occurred on September 30th 2015, between Tatmadaw and Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) soldiers in Day Wah and Kyaw Pah village tracts, Bu Tho Township, Hpapun District. This includes arbitrary arrest and detention, violent abuse of a villager, restrictions on the freedom of movement, and displacement of villagers […]

‘Going back to the old ways’: A new generation of prisoners of conscience in Myanmar

A new Amnesty International briefing – ‘Back to the old ways’ – exposes how repression has drastically picked up pace over the past two years, in stark contrast to official claims that not a single person is imprisoned for peacefully exercising their rights […]

Ethnic Politics and the 2015 Elections in Myanmar

Myanmar/Burma is heading to the polls in November 2015, in what will be
a closely watched election. Provided that they are free and fair, the polls
are likely to have a major influence over the future political direction of the
country, with an expected shift in power from the old elite to the opposition
National League for Democracy (NLD) […]

FBR’s relationship with the Burma Government and an Assessment of the Current Situation in Burma

The situation in Burma is changing, in some case for the better and in others for the worse. In the midst of this FBR continues its mission of giving help, hope and love and putting a light on the situation. In areas where there have been improvements, such as parts of Karen State, some of […]

လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူမ်ားကို ဘယ္လိုကာကြယ္ေပးမလဲ ။

(ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕ -၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔) ျမန္မာအစုိးရအေနျဖင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူမ်ားအား ပစ္မွတ္ထား ဖိႏွိပ္ျခင္း၊ ခ်ဳပ္ျခယ္ျခင္း၊ ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ဖြင့္ဟထုတ္ေဖာ္ ျခင္း မျပဳႏုိင္ဘဲ အသံတိတ္သြားေစရန္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနျခင္းမ်ားအား အျမန္ဆံုးရပ္တန္႔ရမည့္အျပင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္သူ (HRD) မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ ၎တုိ႔၏ တန္ဖုိးရွိၿပီး တရား၀င္မႈရွိေသာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား အႏၱရာယ္ကင္းကင္း ဆက္လက္ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏုိင္ေစရန္ ဥပေဒႏွင့္ တရားစီရင္ေရး ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ယႏၱရားမ်ား အားေကာင္းလာေစေရး မျဖစ္မေနေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္လည္း လုိအပ္သည္ဟု ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ေအေအပီပီ)ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့အေရး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ား (BP) တုိ႔မွ ၎တို႔ယေန႔ပူးတဲြထုတ္ေ၀ေသာ အစီရင္ခံစာတြင္ ေျပာဆုိလုိက္ပါသည္။ […]

How to Defend the Defenders? A Report on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders in Burma and Appropriate Protection Mechanisms

HRD Report Testimonies and reports from inside the country have painted a very different picture to the new tolerant and free Burma that the Burma Government wants the world to see. Those who try to defend human rights, or question the power or narrative of the Burma Government — and their military and corporate backers —now seem to be operating in as dangerous an environment as ever […]

Major Conflict Ongoing in Northern Burma – Reported Military Actions by the Burma Army in Kachin and Northern Shan States April/May 2015

Despite talks of a ceasefire, heavy and escalating fighting has been occurring throughout Northern Burma in the last two months. This report is a summary of this fighting; a more detailed daily analysis of events is available on request. Because this report uses only FBR reports and not those of other sources, it does not represent a totality of events; actual totals may be much higher […]

Thematic Briefing: Armed conflict in Paletwa, southern Chin State

[Chiang Mai, Thailand] The Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) today condemned both the Arakan Army (AA) and the Burma Army for human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, in the context of recent outbreaks of conflict between the two sides in Paletwa, southern Chin State […]

56 Solidarity Groups Worldwide Call for an Immediate End to Offensives in Northern Burma/Myanmar and for the Provision of Unhindered Humanitarian Assistance to the IDPs

Four years ago on 9 June 2011, the Burma Army attacked the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) outpost, breaking a 17-year-old ceasefire agreement. Since then the Burma/Myanmar Government has launched an aggressive military offensive against the KIA and clashes have escalated into an outright recurrent war in Kachin and northern Shan State. As we mark the fourth anniversary of the renewed war in Kachin State, the Burma Army continues to increase its militarization by manipulating its forces into ethnic administrated territories, while the Government has restricted local and international humanitarian access to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), obstructing the delivery of adequate aid and assistance […]

Marching to the Same Tune? A Briefing Paper on Protests and Freedom of Assembly in Burma

Background

Facilitated by the proliferation of social media as an agent for social and political change over the last five years, mass organized protests have simmered and erupted across the globe. From the 2011 “Arab Spring” in the Middle East and North Africa, to the Occupy Movement in Western cities, from the 2013 Maidan Square Revolution in Ukraine, to the recent Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, from stifled democracy movements in Iran, Russia and Cambodia, to austerity protests in southern Europe and the 2014 race protests in Ferguson, Missouri, United States, mass protests have been a defining feature of the decade thus far. Neither is Burma a stranger to mass public protests, especially given its history of the pro-democracy student uprising in 1988 and the monk-led Saffron Revolution in 2007. While it is still premature to claim that 2015 has been another key protest year in Burma, on a par with 1988 and 2007, protests have nevertheless dominated the headlines so far this year […]