UN General Assembly Resolution must Keep the Spotlight on Serious Human Rights Violations

New York, Paris, Bangkok – A UN General Assembly’s Third Committee resolution must continue to address serious human rights violations in Burma, FIDH and its member organization Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN-Burma) urged Permanent Missions to the UN during a visit by an FIDH-organized to New-York […]

Joint Statement of Karen Women’s Groups in Support of the Reunification of the Kawthoolei Armed Forces (KAF)

The Karen Women’s Organization (KWO), Karen Women’s Empowerment Group (KWEG) and Karen Women’s Union (KWU) welcome the announcement, on October 13th, 2014, of the Karen armed resistance groups coming together under the name of “Kawthoolei Armed Forces (KAF)”. The alliance of 4 Karen armed forces meets the long held desire of Karen people everywhere, especially of Karen women. We believe this is an opportunity for both peace building, and improved co-operation which can help reduce violence against women […]

ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္၊ ပလက္၀ျမိဳ႕နယ္မွ ခ်င္းတိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖါက္ခံရျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ပူးတြဲသေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္၊ ပလက္ဝျမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ကုန္ျပင္ေက်းရြာေန ခ်င္းတိုင္းရင္းသား မ်ားျဖစ္ၾက သည့္ ဦးေက်ာ္ေအာင္၊ ဦးေအးလွ၊ ဦးေမာင္စိန္၊ ဦးေက်ာ္ျမင့္ဦး၊ ဦးေအာင္ေက်ာ္လွႏွင့္ ဦးေအာင္ဆိုတို႔ ၆ ဦးအား အေနာက္ပိုင္းတိုင္း စစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ လက္ေအာက္ခံ၊ အမွတ္ ၃၄၄ ေျခလ်င္တပ္ရင္းမွ ဗုိလ္မွဴးတင္ထြဋ္ဦးပါ ၁၃ ဦးအဖြဲ႔မွ ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၈ မွ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔အထိ ခ်င္းအမ်ိဳးသားတပ္ဦး (CNF) ႏွင့္ အဆက္ အသြယ္ ျပဳလုပ္သည္ဟူေသာ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ျဖင့္ မတရားခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ ရိုက္နက္ခဲ့သည့္ အျပင္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၄ ရက္ ေန႔တြင္ ဗိုလ္မွဴးတင္ထြဋ္ဦးမွ ၄င္းတို႔အား ၾကိဳတင္ ေရးထား သည့္ ဝန္ခံဂတိျပဳစာရြက္ေပၚတြင္ အတင္းအၾကပ္ လက္မွတ္ေရးထုိး ေစခိုင္းျခင္း မ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရိွရသည္။ […]

Statement: Civil Societies’ Review on Myanmar’s Transition Process: Prospects for 2015 and Beyond

We, more than 650 representatives from 257 organizations and networks in Myanmar, came together in Yangon for 3 days from 14-16 October 2014 to exchange opinions, debate and to assess a wide range of issues currently confronting Myanmar in the context of recent political developments and the transition process that started in 2011 […]

Document – Myanmar: Media Workers Jailed for Two Years

Five media workers have been sentenced to two years in prison in Myanmar over the publication of a news story. They are prisoners of conscience, detained solely for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression […]

Canadian Burma Ethnic Nationalities Organization Founded at the 2nd Burma Ethnic Nationalities Conference Canada

The second Burma Ethnic Nationalities Conference Canada was successfully held on 11-12 October 2014 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference was attended by representatives and members of Burma ethnic communities from across Canada […]

69th Session of the UN General Assembly – Situation of human rights in Myanmar: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar

I. Introduction

I. The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar was established pursuant to Commission on Human Rights resolution 1992/58 and recently extended by Human Rights Council resolution 25/26. The present report is submitted pursuant to Council resolution 25/26 and General Assembly resolution 68/242.

II. Background

2. Following the completion of the term of the previous mandate holder, the current mandate holder took up her functions only in June 2014, which resulted in a shorter period than usual to conduct a country visit and review the information gathered. The present report therefore sets out the Special Rapporteur’s preliminary observations, to be supplemented by her oral statement to the General Assembly […]

Burma Army Continues to Use the Drugs Trade as a Weapon of War

A new report by Kachin Women’s Association – Thailand (KWAT), “Silent Offensive: How Burma Army Strategies are Fuelling the Kachin Drug Crisis” outlines the severity of the drug problem in northern Burma as well as the complicity of the government in the trade. The report shows how the government is using opium-growing militia forces in its operations against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) as part of a deal in which these militias are given free rein to produce and sell heroin and other narcotics.

Thus, as the report points out, it is members of either Burma Army controlled Border Guard Forces (BGF) such as the New Democratic Army – Kachin (NDAK), a splinter group of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) that became a BGF in 2009, or People’s Militia Forces (PMF) that are heavily involved in offensives against the KIO. Land that is taken by the Burma Army and its proxy forces is then allocated to BGFs/PMFs to utilize however they like. This is often opium cultivation, heroin production and methamphetamine production. To make matters worse these are areas under which the KIO had previously been involved in anti-drug activities but since BGFs or PMFs have taken over, opium cultivation has increased greatly in areas such as Nampaka in northern Shan State and Chipwi in Kachin State […]

The Shell Starts to Crack? Real Owners of Myanmar’s Oil and Gas Come Forward

Overview

Corrupt politicians all over the world use companies and trusts with hidden ownership to seize public property worth billions of dollars. This deprives ordinary citizens of money that should be spent on development and empowers unaccountable elites, often helping them gain and maintain power at the expense of democracy, human rights and peace.

Revealing the real people behind companies is critical to achieving genuine reform in Myanmar, where military families and crony tycoons have long benefited from control of natural resources like gas and gemstones. This is a critical time—in July 2014, Myanmar became a candidate member of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global transparency standard which recommends that the
identities of individuals who own and control oil, gas and mining companies are published. If Myanmar can meet the standard, it will go a long way to addressing the question of who really owns the companies that control the country’s most valuable natural assets […]

Protesters Call for Fair Trial of Myanmar Suspects in Murder of British Tourists

A small crowd of protesters took to the streets of Yangon on the occasion of the Thai premier’s visit to demonstrate on behalf of the two Myanmar migrant workers accused of murdering two British tourists on the Thai holiday island of Koh Tao.

Nay Myo Zin, a former military captain and political prisoner organized the demonstration in front of Yangon City Hall between 8 and 9 am October 10 to call for a free and fair trial by the Thai authorities of Myanmar nationals Zaw Lin and Win Zaw Htun, both 21 […]