International Community’s Premature Rewards Fail to Address Armed Conflict and Human Rights Violations in Burma

This briefer looks at the April by-elections, new laws that fail to protect the people, ongoing armed conflict, problematic development, sanctions, and offers recommendations to the international community and guidelines for investment in Burma […]

Lessons from the Kachin “Development” Experience

Burma’s government is using the promise of development as a key component in its current peace negotiations with armed ethnic organizations, proposing ceasefire first, then development, and finally a national political agreement. This process has been tried before in Kachin State with disastrous consequences

Not Open for Business: Despite Elections, Investor Risk Remains High in Burma

The April 1 Burmese by-elections are being heralded as a great success both for the people of Burma and for the international community after more than a decade of sanctions. While there is cause to celebrate in the wake of initial reforms by President Thein Sein and the electoral victory of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, high levels of risk for investors – and the people of Burma – remain […]

Burma Briefing No. 18: By-Elections Don’t Mean Burma is Free

In the run-up to by-elections on 1 April, this commentary by Zoya Phan, Campaigns Manager at Burma Campaign UK, looks at the details behind the headline changes in Burma […]

Burma’s By-Elections: Still Short of International Standards

While the by-elections have limited political significance, they are important because they are being championed as an indicator of progress by the international community after the sham 2010 polls. Despite the hype, the bulk of laws and regulations […]

Burma in the Balance: The Role of Foreign Assistance in Supporting Burma’s Democratic Transition

The historic constraints on donor interventions in Burma—whether self-imposed sanctions or regime-imposed barriers—are increasingly giving way to a sense of heightened optimism about the possibilities of working on issues across the development spectrum. But while the terrain appears to be improving, there remain substantial barriers to effective programming beyond the overall pace and scope of political reform […]

Forgotten Workforce

Burma’s continuing political repression and economic deterioration, coupled with China’s rapid growth, have caused a new phenomenon over the past few years: large-scale northward migration from Burma to China […]

Freedom of Expression and Opinion in Burma: Still a Long Way to Go

There have been a number of positive developments in Burma with respect to the freedom of expression and opinion over the course of 2011 including some reductions in the level of censorship of the press, the loosening of restrictions on access to the Internet, and the recent release of political prisoners. However, while the international community has been focused on these openings, hundreds more individuals remain in prison solely for expressing their opinions and numerous obstacles continue to make it difficult for journalists and ordinary citizens in Burma to exercise their rights to freedom of expression and opinion […]

လယ္ယာေျမ အဓၶမသိမ္းယူမႈ မ်ားႏွင့္ေအာင္ပြဲအပိုင္းအစမ်ား

The Farmers’ Rights Defenders Network, a Burma-based rights group, has released a new publication documenting and recounting the courageous fight against land expropriation, intimidation and false prosecution of a group of rural villagers […]

ဤအစီရင္ခံစာသည္ မေကြးတိုင္းေဒသၾကီး၊ သရက္ခရိုင္၊ ကံမျမိဳ႕နယ္၊ စစၥရံေက်းရြာရွိ ရိုးသားစြာ လုပ္ကိုင္စားေသာက္ေသာ လယ္သမားမ်ား မတရားမႈမ်ားကို မိမိတို႕၏ စုစည္းမႈအားျဖင့္ တြန္းလွန္၍ တရားမွ်တမႈကို ရွာေဖြတိုက္ပြဲဝင္ခဲ့ၾကသည့္ ျဖစ္ရပ္တခုအား […]

Coercion, Cruelty and Collateral Damage

An assessment of grave violations of children’s rights in conflict zones of southern Burma  

This report is titled “Coercion, Cruelty and Collateral Damage: An assessment of grave violations of children’s rights in conflict zones of southern Burma”, and it is released by the Woman and Child Rights Project (WCRP), which was founded in 2000 by members of the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM) to monitor and protect the rights of women and children in southern Burma. The 24-page report reveals that grave violations of children’s rights such as recruitment of child soldiers, killing and maiming, rape and sexual abuse, and forced labor continue to be committed by the Burmese military, despite the creation, by the United Nation Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1612 on Children and Armed Conflict passed in 2005 […]