Protesters Allege Corruption of Judge in Irrawaddy Division

PATHEIN, Irrawaddy Division — More than 200 locals staged a demonstration in front of the local courthouse against the rulings of a judge in Pantanaw Township, Irrawaddy Division, last week.

Pantanaw locals allege that the township judge, Thida One, has taken bribes, issued unjust rulings, delayed trials and refused defendants’ bail […]

“ဘိန္းႏြံတြင္းက ငိုရႈိက္သံ” အစီရင္ခံစာ

နိဒါန္း

၁၈၈၆ တြင္ အထက္ျမန္မာျပည္ကို အဂၤလိပ္တို႔ သိမ္းပိုက္ၿပီးေနာက္ တရုတ္-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ တေလ်ာက္တြင္ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ၌ ဘိန္းစိုက္ပ်ဳိးထုတ္လုပ္မႈ စတင္ ထြန္းကား ရာေဒသ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့ သည္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသည္ ၁၉၄၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အဂၤလိပ္တို႔ ထံမွ လြတ္လပ္ေရး ရရွိခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္မွ ဘိန္းစိုက္ပ်ဳိး ထုတ္လုပ္ မႈသည္ အနာဂတ္တြင္ ျပႆနာမ်ားျဖစ္ထြန္းမႈ ပိုမိုႀကီးထြား လာေစသည့္ မ်ဳိးေစ့မ်ားကို ခ်ထားၿပီး ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ […]

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 […]

Myanmar Takes Global Lead on Company Ownership Transparency

25 oil and gas companies in Myanmar have set a global precedent by publishing who their real owners are, said Global Witness in a new report published today.

“People need to know who is buying up their most valuable assets – this is a global first in one of the places you might least expect it,” said […]

Joint Submission on the Proposed World Bank Group’s Country Partnership Framework (CPF) in Myanmar

We, the undersigned organizations in Myanmar and other countries, respectfully submit these comments to the World Bank Group to inform the development of the Country Partnership Framework for Myanmar. We belong to civil society organizations and ethnic community networks with a focus on human rights, environment, peace and mediation, and good governance with significant expertise and experience in Myanmar […]

U.S. Companies Report on Burma/Myanmar Investments

Reporting Requirements Spur Disclosures, But Questions Remain (Washington, D.C.)—Today, the second set of annual reports pursuant to the U.S. Government’s Burma Responsible Investment Reporting Requirements was published. The reports include disclosures related to human rights, workers’ rights, the environment, anti-corruption, land acquisition, revenue transparency and military communications. “We welcome the newly submitted reports, and look forward to engaging […]

Data Corruption: Exposing the True Scale of Logging in Myanmar

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) released a new briefing Data Corruption: Exposing the true scale of logging in Myanmar, scrutinizing official figures on log harvests and timber exports over the past 15 years.

Myanmar’s Six Billion Dollar Timber Corruption Black Hole Revealed by Official Data

LONDON: New analysis of the Myanmar Government’s forestry and trade data points to a multi-billion dollar illegal logging and exports black hole – indicating widespread criminality and official corruption[…]

Right to Counsel: The Independence of Lawyers in Myanmar

Lawyers continue to encounter impediments to the exercise of their professional functions and freedom of association, as well as pervasive corruption, although they have been able to act with greater independence, says the ICJ in a new report launched today.

Right to Counsel: The Independence of Lawyers in Myanmar – based on interviews with 60 lawyers in practice in the country – says authorities have significantly decreased their obstruction of, and interference in, legal processes since the country began political reforms in 2011 […]

Lawyers Still Face Restrictions Despite Increased Independence

Lawyers continue to encounter impediments to the exercise of their professional functions and freedom of association, as well as pervasive corruption, although they have been able to act with greater independence, says the ICJ in a new report launched today […]