Statement in Solidarity with CSOs in Withdrawal from 2014 Interface Meeting Between ASEAN Governments’ and CSOs’ Representatives

The withdrawal from the interface with ASEAN leaders by Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), followed by the complete cancellation of interface by ASEAN governments which happened on the 10th May 2014 during the time of ASEAN Summit in Nay Pyi Thaw, Myanmar, had become another round of proof on the different interpretation on the ‘people-centered ASEAN’ between ASEAN’s people and ASEAN’s governments […]

Government Leaders Not Ready for Genuine People-centered ASEAN

As the leaders of the governments of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) gathered in Burma for the 2014 summit over the weekend, Cambodian, Malaysian and Singaporean leaders refused to meet with genuine civil society representatives. These three ASEAN member states were poised to substitute the Interface Delegates chosen by civil society groups with their own nominees, which lead the meeting between the ASEAN leaders and civil society representatives to be canceled at the last minute. The ten Interface Delegates were chosen by civil society groups to represent the voices of the 3,000 people who attended the historic ASEAN Civil Society Conference / ASEAN Peoples’ Conference 2014 (ACSC/APF 2014) held in Rangoon, Burma in March […]

ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN Peoples’ Forum Withdraws from Interface with Heads of Government

We, the Regional Steering Committee and Interface Delegates of ACSC/APF 2014, after consultations on 9 -10 May in Yangon, unanimously decided to withdraw from the Interface Meeting with ASEAN Heads of Government. The 30-minute interface was scheduled to be held at 3pm on Sunday, May 11, during the 24th ASEAN Summit in Naypyidaw. We are sad that we have to cancel our participation in the Interface meeting as the collective representatives of ACSC/APF 2014 […]

Malaysian Government Undermines ASEAN Processes

Malaysian civil society organisations are appalled that, ahead of the ASEAN Summit on 11th May 2014, the Malaysian government has objected to the Malaysian civil society delegate due to attend the Interface Meeting between Civil Society and the ASEAN Heads of State. We are further dismayed by news that the Cambodian and Singaporean governments […]

ACSC/APF 2014 is Burma’s Chance to Set a Positive Benchmark for ASEAN Civl Society

On 21-23 March, the 2014 ASEAN Civil Society Conference (ACSC), otherwise known as the ASEAN People’s Forum (APF), will take place in Rangoon, Burma.  The ACSC/APF is held annually by the ASEAN Chair country – currently Burma – in advance of and parallel to the official ASEAN Summit, which will be held in May and attended by ASEAN and regional leaders.

The ACSC/APF is the showcase event for the ASEAN civil society community.  Civil society actors from across the ten ASEAN countries, as well as Timor Leste, and beyond will be coming to Rangoon to attend a range of programs, events and workshops on a variety of ASEAN issues.   Their mandate is to represent the voices of the people of ASEAN.  The theme of this year’s ACSC/APF is “Advancing ASEAN People’s Solidarity toward sustainable peace, development, justice and democratization”.

EU-Myanmar: Embrace Civil Society!

The developing EU-Myanmar partnership must reflect commitments to civil society, said an alliance of human rights organizations ahead of the launch of the EU-Myanmar Joint Task Force. “We urge you to ensure substantive civil society participation in all areas of the task force,” the organizations wrote in a letter to EU High Representative Catherine Ashton […]

Update on Progress of Response by Myanmar Civil Society Organizations on Draft Association Law

On 27 July 2013, draft Association Law prepared by Public Affair Management Committee (PAMC) of the People Assembly was published with a notice for the public to study and comment before it is submitted to the parliament for discussion. On 31 July, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) from Yangon and Mandalay held workshops in their own […]

Civil Society Recommendations on the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Law

On August 2, 38 civil society organizations, community-based organizations and networks from Burma send to Thura U Shwe Mann, Union Parliament Speaker, recommendations and proposed amendments to the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) draft law in order to ensure the MNHRC’s independence […]

Statement of the Burma Civil Society Workshop on ASEAN

We, 28 representatives from 17 community organizations from Thailand-Burma Border, acknowledging commitment of Women’s League Burma, SAPA Task Force on ASEAN and Burma, Burma Partnership, Mon Youth Progressive Organization, All Kachin Student Youth Union and Pa-Oh Youth Organization to take part in the preparation and implementation of 2014 ACSC/APF […]

ကခ်င္ျပည္သူလူထုႏွင့္ အရပ္ဘက္လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား ေတြ႔ဆံုညွိႏႈိင္းေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္အစုိးရႏွင့္ KIO တုိ႔အၾကား ခ်ဳပ္ဆုိခဲ့သည့္ ၁၉၉၄ ခုႏွစ္၊ အပစ္အခတ္ရပ္စဲေရး သေဘာတူစာခ်ဳပ္ သည္ (၁၇) ႏွစ္ၾကာျပီးသည့္ေနာက္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇြန္လ ၉ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ပ်က္ျပားခဲ့ျပီး တုိက္ပြဲမ်ားျပန္လည္စ တင္ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည္မွာ ၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇြန္လ ၉ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ႏွစ္ႏွစ္တင္းတင္းျပည့္ခဲ့ျပီ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ႏွစ္ႏွစ္တာ ကာလအတြင္း ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္အစုိးရႏွင့္ KIO တုိ႔အၾကား ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမ်ားကုိ အၾကိမ္ေပါင္း […]