New Report: Devolved Federal Governance Crucial to Protect Sustainable Customary Land Tenure Systems in Burma

‘Our Customary Lands,’ a report launched today by the Ethnic Community Development Forum “ECDF”, is calling on the government to protect and recognize ethnic customary land management systems through a new federal constitution and decentralized legal framework […]

On World Refugee Day Burma Government and International Community Must Commit to Respecting Voices and Rights of Burma’s Refugees

(20 June, 2015) On this 2015 World Refugee Day, we stand in solidarity with the over 110,000 refugees who fled Burma to seek protection in the nine camps along the Thailand-Burma border, embodying the years of conflict and the struggle for democracy […] ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႕တြင္ က်ေရာက္သည့္ ကမၻာ့ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားေန႔တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ထြက္ေျပးလာၿပီး ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္ရွိ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္း (၉) ခု၌ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္မႈခံယူေနေသာ ဒုကၡသည္ ၁၁၀,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ႏွင့္ အတူ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ ေသြးစည္းညီၫြတ္စြာ ရပ္တည္ေနပါသည္။ ယင္းဒုကၡသည္မ်ားမွာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ၾကာေညာင္းေနၿပီျဖစ္သည့္ စစ္ပြဲ ႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးတိုက္ပြဲကို ထင္ဟပ္ေနပါသည္။ ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔သည္ ကုလသမဂၢဒုကၡသည္မ်ားဆိုင္ရာမဟာမင္းႀကီး (UNHCR)၊ ျမန္မာအစိုးရ၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအလႉရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ သက္ဆိုင္သူအားလံုးတို႕ကို ၁၉၅၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဒုကၡသည္အဆင့္အတန္းဆိုင္ရာ ကြန္ဗင္း ရွင္းသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ႏွင့္ ၁၉၆၇ ခုႏွစ္ ဒုကၡသည္အဆင့္အတန္းဆိုင္ရာ လုပ္ထံုးလုပ္နည္းတို႔အား ေလးစားလိုက္နာရန္ႏွင့္ ဒုကၡသည္အားလံုး၏ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင့္ေရွာက္အားေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါသည္။ […]

New report by Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma Details Continuing Human Rights Violations by Burmese Military against its Citizens

ND-Burma has published its periodic report covering the second-mid period of 2014 and focuses on 107 documented cases of human rights violations in Burma from July to December 2014. The violations documented during these six months occurred in areas of armed conflict but also in areas covered by ceasefires.

ND-Burma’s findings demonstrate that, despite progress in reaching ceasefire agreements with non-state armed groups, the government has made little progress protecting the human rights of its citizens. Furthermore, continued arrests of human rights defenders demonstrate that the government is not serious about working with civil society to protect human rights […]

ျမန္မာ့တပ္မေတာ္မွ ပစ္ခတ္မႈေၾကာင့္ ကခ်င္လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္ (KIA) မွ အရာရွိမ်ား ထိခိုက္က်ဆုံးရျခင္းအေပၚ သေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

Are You Listening, President Obama?

US President Barack Obama’s made his much-anticipated second trip to Burma last week during the 25^th ASEAN Summit, amid growing awareness that the reforms which he so eagerly celebrated during his 2012 trip are quickly unravelling – or being exposed for the stage-managed charade that they are.
In 2012, it was all too easy to trust the reform process. National elections had been scheduled for 2015, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi had been freed from house arrest and elected to Parliament, political prisoners had been released, a nationwide ceasefire process was underway with the majority of armed ethnic groups, and restrictions on media and civil society had been drastically loosened. And so the US and the international community embraced the reforms.

Yet, last month, in her recent address to the UN General Assembly, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma Yanghee Lee warned of the risks of backtracking. Then, earlier this month, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi labelled the process as “stalled” and remarked that “there have been times when the [US] government has seemed over-optimistic about the reform process.”

Furthermore, there has been a flurry of recent calls from civil society across Burma, directly raising their various concerns about the reform process with President Obama. The Karen Human Rights Group wrote an open letter drawing President Obama’s attention to human rights violations resulting from the ongoing government military presence throughout south-eastern Burma; […]

Statement by Shan Community Based Organizations (CBOs) to US President Barack Obama

We, Shan community based organisations, deplore the large-scale offensive that the Burma Army has been conducting in central Shan State since June 2014, which is in violation of an existing ceasefire agreement and completely negates the Burmese government’s claims to be building nationwide peace. We urge President Obama to publicly raise concerns about this offensive with President Thein Sein during his visit to Naypyidaw, and to call for the Burmese government to immediately end its military operations and begin political dialogue to end the civil war. […]

Displaced Communities Await Political Dialogue in Myanmar

Bangkok/Yangon – As Myanmar’s government prepares to host the ASEAN Summit next week, conflict-affected communities are wondering if and how the peace process can get back on track. Negotiations for a nationwide ceasefire agreement are stumbling and national elections are due at the end of 2015. However, political dialogue to address ethnic conflict is essential to promote national reconciliation according to a new report from a consortium of relief and development agencies. […]

နိုဝင္ဘာ ၁ ၊ ၂၀၁၄ ေန႔စြဲျဖင့္ အစိုးရထုတ္ သတင္းစာမ်ားတြင္ ပါရိွသည့္ ‘နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (AAPP)ႏွင့္ နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္းမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ (FPPS) တုိ႔၏ တင္ျပမႈအေပၚ စိစစ္ခ်က္အရ အျခားျပစ္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့သူ ျပစ္ဒဏ္က်ခံဆဲ (၂၇)ဦး အမည္စာရင္း’ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ အေပၚ သေဘာထားေႀကညာခ်က္

နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (AAPP) ႏွင့္ နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္း မ်ားအဖြဲ႔(FPPS) တုိ႔သည္ စတင္တည္ေထာင္ခ်ိန္မွစ၍ နိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသား တစ္ဦးခ်င္းစီ၏ အမႈျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ား၊ အမႈတြဲဖိုင္မ်ား၊ စီရင္ခ်က္ မ်ားကို ရနိုင္သမွ် ေလ့လာစစ္ေဆး သံုးသပ္ျပီး၊ မိမိတို႔ ဖြင့္ဆုိထားသည့္နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသား အဓိပၸါယ္ ဖြင့္ဆိုခ်က္ႏွင့္အညီ နုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား စာရင္းကို ျပဳစု ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ […]

Burmese Government Troops again shell Civilian Area, Commit other Human Rights Abuses in Ke See Township

During October 12-18, 2014, the Burmese government troops continued to commit abuses against civilians during their ongoing offensive against the Shan State Progress Party/Shan State Army (a.k.a Shan State Army-North or SSA-N) in Ke See Township, central Shan State. SHRF has documented the arrest and torture of five villagers, as well as “house arrest” of seven women and girls, including a heavily pregnant woman. On October 13, shells were again fired into a civilian area, damaging housing and killing livestock, and causing over 180 villagers to seek shelter in a local temple […]

Karen Armed Forces Statement on Reunification (ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသား လက္နက္ကိုင္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႔မ်ား ျပန္လည္ေပါင္းစည္းျခင္း သေဘာတူညီခ်က္)

1. In accordance with the wishes of the Karen people, we, the forces of KNLA, KNDO, DKBA and KNU/KNLA-PC have unanimously reunified as the (Kawthoolei Armed Forces – KAF) […]