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: 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 […]

Burma Army Burns Villagers’ Homes to the Ground

Burma Army soldiers burnt down the homes of six villagers in Nam San Yang Township in Burma’s Kachin State, near the China-Burma border, on 25 March 2012. The soldiers belong to the Tatmadaw 388 Light Infantry Division, which has been terrorizing civilians in Kachin State […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Irregularities Tarnish the Credibility of Upcoming By-Elections

“The Special Rapporteur is concerned at continuing allegations of campaign irregularities and attemps to limit campaign activities,” stated Tomás Ojea Quintana in his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council released on Friday. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma further stressed that “the credibility of the elections will not be determined solely on the day of the vote, but on the basis of the entire process leading up and following election day.”

This report comes at the same time as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been alerting the Union Election Commission and the international community about the obstacles and restrictions that the NLD is facing on the campaign trail. Speaking after a meeting with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird on Thursday, Daw Suu said that official voter lists for next month’s by-elections include dead people and open the possibility for fraud […]

ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေၾကညာစာတမ္း

[…] အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္၏ ျပန္လည္မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္ရန္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ရျခင္း၏ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မ်ားမွာ (၁) တရားဥပေဒစိုးမိုးေရး (၂) ျပည္တြင္းျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရရွိေရး (၃) ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒကို ျပင္ဆင္ႏိုင္ေရးျဖစ္ေပသည္ […]