Alleged Amnesty is Highly Limited in Nature and Amounts to a Paltry Reduction of Harsh Prison Terms

On 2 January, President U Thein Sein of the Union Solidarity Development Party signed amnesty order 1/2012, authorizing a commutation of death sentences to life and a reduction in prison terms. Those prisoners serving more than 30 year sentences […]

The Recognition of Political Prisoners: Essential to Democratic and National Reconciliation Process

Reconciling divide on political prisoner numbers

The exact number of political prisoners in Burma has been hotly disputed over the past few months. It comes as no surprise that members of the U Thein Sein regime, such as the Presidential Advisor and Foreign Minister, dispute the numbers of political prisoners, saying estimates of political prisoners are inflated and erroneous. The burden of proof rests on the U Thein Sein regime, not the opposition, and calls for the regime to publicly disclose its prisoner lists along with evidence proving the status of each political detainee […]

AAPP Calls to Bridge the Gap on Political Prisoner Numbers

In order for the deep divide on political prisoner numbers to be reconciled, it has become increasingly urgent for there to be a consensus on the number of political prisoners in Burma. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – Burma (AAPP) fully supports recent statements by Tomas Ojea Quintana, Special Rapporteur on human rights situation on Burma, that the International Committee of the Red Cross should be allowed independent and regular access into Burma’s prisons with the aim of investigating the political status of each prisoner in Burma […]

Lawmakers and Civil Society Call on ASEAN to Delay Burma Chairmanship Decision

Representatives from Burma’s civil society based in the Thai-Burma border areas held a press conference today calling on ASEAN to delay their decision about Burma’s bid for the 2014 chairmanship until the country takes substantial key steps […]

ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္၏ ၄၉ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ေမြးေန႕ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

ယေန႕သည္ ျမန္မာ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈ၏ ေခါင္းေဆာင္တဦးျဖစ္သူ ကိုမင္းကိုႏိုင္၏ ၄၉ ႏွစ္ျပည့္ ေမြးေန႕ ျဖစ္ေပသည္။ “မ်က္ရည္ေတြ သိမ္းႏိုင္မွ က်ေနာ္ အားလံုးကို မဂၤလာပါလို႕ ႏႈတ္ခြန္းဆက္တာ အဓိပၸါယ္ ရွိပါလိမ့္မယ္ဗ်ာ။ […]

AAPP Urges the External Hospitalization for a Critically Ill Political Prisoner

AAPP has learned that Nay Myo Zin has been repeatedly denied vital medical care and has been unable to sit or walk without severe pain, causing him to forego his family visits. His repeated denials come at a time when the U Thein Sein administration granted an amnesty to those prisoners in poor health […]

Prisoner Release Lacks Sincerity

Yesterday, the U Thein Sein administration attempted to appease the international community by offering its second so-called amnesty. Though the announcement was made on the 11th of October that 6,359 prisoners would be released, no public information […]

Update on the October 12 Prisoner Release

The U Thein Sein administration announced on the 11th of October that 6,359 prisoners would be released under a general amnesty. As of today, October 12, 2011, the first group of prisoners was released […]

Criteria for AAPP’s Definition of a Political Prisoner

AAPP defines a political prisoner as anyone who is arrested because of his or her perceived or real active involvement or supporting role in political movements with peaceful or resistant means. AAPP maintains that the motivation behind the arrest of every individual in AAPP’s database is political, regardless of the laws they have been sentenced under […]

Leaked internal report reveals the staggering scale of those arrested during Saffron

On this day, the 4th anniversary of the Saffron Revolution, a leaked internal document from the Special Branch of the police force reveals for the first time the exact number of those who were arrested and detained during Saffron […]