Urgent Reforms Are the Real litmus Test of Government’s Commitment to Change

In the lead-up to the by-elections on 1 April, which are already marred by irregularities and censorship [1], rights groups have stressed that key benchmarks have not yet been met. The international community must press for urgent steps to meet these benchmarks […]

Burma: By-Elections a Step, but Not Real Reform

Burma’s April 1, 2012 by-elections are a step forward, but are not a real test of the government’s commitment to democratic reform, Human Rights Watch said today. “April’s by-election in Burma will almost certainly bring opposition […]

UK Must Not Abandon Burma’s Political Prisoners

Burma Campaign UK today called on British Foreign Secretary William Hague to ensure the European Union maintains pressure on the military backed government in Burma until all political prisoners are released and other key benchmarks are met […]

ျပည္သူလူထုထံသို႕ အသိေပး ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လ (၉) ရက္မွ စတင္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေသာ ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္၏ စစ္ဆင္ေရးမွာ ယခုဆိုလွ်င္ (၁၀) လ ၾကာျမွင့္ခဲ့ျပီ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ဇႏၷဝါရီလ (၁၈) ရက္ေန႕အထိ တရုတ္ျပည္သူ႕ သမၼတႏိုင္ငံ ေရႊလီျမိဳ႕တြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့ေသာ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ ေကအိုင္အိုကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖြဲ႕မွ ေဆြးေႏြးေရးအဆင့္ (၃) ဆင့္ပါရွိေသာ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္စာခ်ဳပ္အား […]

Untold Miseries: Wartime Abuses and Forced Displacement in Kachin State

In his March 2011 inauguration speech, Burmese President Thein Sein emphasized the importance of ending Burma’s several ethnic armed conflicts, declaring that more than 60 years of ethnic warfare in Burma were due to “dogmatism, sectarian strife, and racism.” Burma’s ethnic minorities had, he said […]

Burma: Reforms Yet to Reach Kachin State

The Burmese government has committed serious abuses and blocked humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of displaced civilians since June 2011, in fighting in Burma’s northern Kachin State, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today […]

By-Elections Must Not Be Seen as Benchmark of Reform

The international community, including many western governments, has indicated that it views the upcoming 1 April by-elections in Burma as a key benchmark in the country’s reform process and many have argued that a successful process should lead to the lifting of economic sanctions. However, free and fair balloting alone is insufficient to demonstrate that the by-elections have moved Burma into a period of true democracy because the process has been structured to maintain the military’s grip on power.

Only 48 seats in the Parliament, 7% of the total available parliamentary seats, are being contested in the by-elections. Those seats being contested are open predominantly because the individual originally elected to fill them, all of whom are members of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), was appointed to a position in the executive branch. Thus, only a small fraction of the country will be participating in this election and the vast majority of the people of Burma will continue to be represented by the individuals who supposedly won the 2010 elections, which were nothing more than a sham […]

Oral Statement Prepared for the Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Burma in 19th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council

FIDH and and its member organization Altsean-Burma welcome the report by the Special Rapporteur and his emphasis on the situation political prisoners, institutional reforms, and accountability for gross human rights violations […]

ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ ျမစ္ၾကီးနား ပဲ့တင္သံ

ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႕ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ တိုင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ဳိးစုေပါင္းစံု ေနထိုင္ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။ စစ္ေဘးဒဏ္သင့္တိုင္းရင္းသား ညီအစ္ကိုေမာင္ႏွမမ်ားအတြက္ လိုအပ္ေသာ ေထာက္ပံ့ကူညီမႈမ်ား […]

Ceasefires Are Not Peace: KNU Lays Out Crucial Steps to Achieve Lasting Peace in Burma

In a press conference today, the Karen National Union laid out a four-step roadmap of essential stages that will be required to achieve genuine and sustainable peace in Burma […]