Statement on Myanmar By-Elections (April 1, 2012)

The by-elections in Myanmar marks a historic phase in the country’s transition towards democracy and ANFREL-Foundation takes this opportunity to congratulate the people of Myanmar. The byelections were extremely significant to sustain the reforms process […]

By-Elections: A Public Relations Game

With less than one week until the 1 April by-elections in Burma, it is abundantly clear that the process has been anything but free and fair. In an attempt to legitimize the upcoming elections, Thein Sein’s government on Wednesday confirmed that it had invited international monitors to visit Burma and observe the election. However, only one day earlier, it had expelled from the country a representative of the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL), a regional organization advocating for “free, honest and clean elections.” The decision to allow in international observers but deny access for independent civil society demonstrates that the by-elections are more about winning the approval of the international community than listening to the voices of local communities in Burma.

While international observation of the election is something that has been called for by many foreign governments and non-governmental organizations, the invitation comes too late for the observers to monitor critical portions of the electoral process. As ANFREL noted in a statement on March 22 “It is regrettable therefore that the invitations, which included the United States, the European Union, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), come less than two weeks before election day […]

Weekly Political Events Regarding the Post Election (048/2010)

* ျပည္ေတာင္စု ၾကံ့ခိုင္ေရးႏွင့္ ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးပါတီ USDP ၏ ေနျပည္ေတာ္ တံခါးပိတ္အစည္းအေဝးတြင္ ပါတီဥကၠဌ၊ အတြင္းေရးမွဴးအပါအဝင္ တစ္ႏိုင္ငံလံုးရွိ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ၄၀၀ ခန္႕တက္ေရာက္ျပီး အနာဂတ္လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ား၊ လႊတ္ေတာ္၌ ေျပာဆိုၾကမည့္ အေၾကာင္းအရာမ်ား၊ ေပၚေပါက္လာမည့္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ထဲ၌ တာဝန္ယူခြဲေဝေရး အပါအဝင္ လာမည့္အစိုးရသစ္တြင္ တာဝန္ယူသြားၾကမည့္ ရာထူးမ်ားအေၾကာင္းကို အဓိကေဆြးေႏြးၾကသည္ဟု အဆိုပါအစည္းအေဝး တက္ေရာက္ေနသူ ပါတီကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ေဇကမာၻ ဦးခင္ေရႊက ေျပာသည္။
* သံလြင္ျမစ္ေပၚရွိ ေရကာတာေဆာက္လုပ္ေရး စီမံကိန္းတစ္ခုသို႕ သြားေရာက္ရန္ လာေသာ စစ္အစိုးရတပ္ ယာဥ္တန္းတစ္ခုကို ကရင္ျပည္ တိုးတက္ေရးပါတီ (KNPP) အဖြဲ႕က ကယားျပည္နယ္ ဖရူးဆိုးျမိဳ႕နယ္အတြင္းတြင္ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၂၃ ရက္ေန႕၌ ခ်ဳံခိုတိုက္ခုိက္ခဲ့ရာ တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံသား ေဆာက္လုပ္ေရး လုပ္သားမ်ားအပါအဝင္ အနည္းဆံုး ၃ ဦး ေသဆံုးျပီး ထိခိုက္ဒဏ္ရာရမႈမ်ား ရွိခဲ့သည္ဟု (KNPP) အတြင္းေရးမွဴး-၁ ခူးဦးရယ္က အတည္ျပဳေျပာၾကားလိုက္သည္။

Myanmar after the Elections: A Call for Essential Comprehensive Electoral Reform

In the statement, ANFREL provides recommendations regarding structural changes, voter registration, parties and candidates, campaign period, union election commission, media, and advance voting & the counting process […]

ASIAN Election Monitoring Organizations question unfair practices in the Burma Electoral process

From it’s position as a regional election observation group which supports the process of democratization through a free and fair electoral process, the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) considers it important to make its position clear in the larger interest of democracy in Burma. First and foremost, it must be made clear that election observation is possible only if the conditions provided are free and fair and are in sync with the international principles guiding a democratic electoral process.

In this context ANFREL and other election monitoring organizations within the ASEAN and also those that share similar concerns in Asia have called for a review of the election regulations, orders and practices on electoral contests, which pertains to respecting the basic rights of parties, candidates and voters […]