Inspiring Women of Burma

Last week, the world commemorated International Women’s Day, acknowledging the achievements and challenges of half of humanity […]

Burma’s Parliamentary Election

The United States congratulates the people of Burma on the November 8 election and commends all of the people and institutions in the country who worked together to hold a peaceful and historic poll. Millions of people from around the country, many of whom were voting for the first time, seized this opportunity to move one step closer to a democracy that respects the rights of all–a testament to the courage and sacrifice shown by the people of Burma over many decades […]

မဲဆႏၵရွင္မ်ား၏ေရြးခ်ယ္မႈ ႏွင့္ ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ အေထြေထြေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားပါ၀င္မႈ

ၿမန္မာ့ႏူိင္ငံေရးသမုိင္းစဥ္တစ္ေလ်ာက္တြင္ အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားသည္ အၿခားေသာႏူိင္ငံမ်ားနည္းတူ ေရြး ေကာက္ခံကုိယ္စားလွယ္၊ မဲေပးသူ၊ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ေလာင္း၊ ႏွင့္ တက္ၾကြႏူိးၾကားမႈရွိေသာ ႏူိင္ငံသားမ်ားအၿဖစ္ၿဖင့္ ပါ၀င္ေနခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ၾကားၿဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအၿပီးရရွိေသာ ကိန္းဂဏန္း မ်ားအရ ၿပည္ေထာင္စုလႊတ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ ၿပည္နယ္ ႏွင့္တုိင္းေဒသၾကီးလႊတ္ေတာ္ ႏွစ္ရပ္ စလုံး၌ အမ်ိဳးသမီးလႊတ္ေတာ္ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ ၅၃ ဦး (၄.၆%) ပါ၀င္ၿပီး ၿပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ ၂၅ ဦး (၇.၈%)၊ အမ်ိဳးသားလႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ ၄ ဦး (၂.၄%)၊ ၿပည္နယ္ႏွင့္ တုိင္းေဒသၾကီး လႊတ္ေတာ္ တြင္ ၂၄ ဦး (၃.၆%) ရွိသည္ၿဖစ္ရာ က်ားမတန္းတူညီမွ်ေရးအတြက္ အနိမ့္ဆုံးလုိအပ္ခ်က္ၿဖစ္ သည့္ အၿပည္ၿပည္ဆုိင္ရာ စံႏႈန္း ၃၀% ၿပည့္မွီရန္ မ်ားစြာလုိပါေသးသည္ […]

ဒီမုိကေရစီ ပညာေရးလွဳပ္ရွားမွဳ ဦးေဆာင္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား၏ ခ်ီတတ္ဆႏၵျပမႈအေပၚ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ျမွင့္တင္သူမ်ားအဖြဲြ႕ (HRDP) ၏ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ဒီမုိကေရစီ ပညာေရး လွဳပ္ရွားမွဳ ဦးေဆာင္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား၏ ခ်ီတက္ဆႏၵျပမႈၾကီးသည္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး စံခ်ိန္ စံညႊန္းမ်ားႏွင့္ လုံး၀ကုိက္ညီမွဳ ရွိေပသည္။ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ပညာသင္ၾကားခြင့္ကုိ ေတာင္းဆုိျခင္း၊ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာ ကင္းသည့္ ပညာေရး လြတ္လပ္ခြင့္ကုိ ေတာင္းဆုိျခင္းတုိ႕ေၾကာင့္ ယေန႔ေက်ာင္းသားတုိ႔ သပိတ္ေမွာက္ ေတာင္းဆုိျခင္းသည္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆုိင္ရာ ခုခံကာကြယ္ျခင္းျဖစ္ေပသည္။ […]

Over 650 Myanmar/Burma Civil Society Actors Speak Out on the Reality of the Transition

The forum titled, “Civil Societies’ Review on Myanmar/Burma’s Transition Process: Prospects for 2015 and Beyond”, held on 15 – 17 October 2014 at the Myanmar Christian Fellowship of the Blind Center in Rangoon, brought together over 650 representatives from 257 organizations and networks from across the country and border areas to discuss and strategize a wide range of key issues currently facing Burma in the context of the recent economic and political reforms since 2011. This is the first forum of this scale to assess the reform and the wide range of problems currently facing Burma.

Despite the hailed “transition to democracy,” exalted particularly by the international community, civil society organizations (CSOs) spoke of the decades old challenges that remain unresolved, the stagnation of the reform process, and new emerging issues, in addition to the need for meaningful inclusion of the voices of civil society, democratic opposition forces, ethnic peoples, women and youth in the reform process.

The forum addressed six core issues; (1) law reform, (2) peace and conflict, (3) media, hate speech and communal violence, (4) Parliament, Government and accountability, (5) economic reform and foreign direct investment, and (6) the international community’s role and involvement, which were discussed under six panel discussions and six workshops. The forum produced a statement that gave concrete recommendations from civil society groups to the Burma Government, United Nations, international governments and international non-governmental organizations (lNGOs) […]

Critique of Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Blueprint for Development in Southeastern Burma/Myanmar

Executive Summary

The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has recently issued a blueprint that proposes industrial development in Southeast Burma/Myanmar, purportedly to aid in the return and settlement of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Karen and Mon States. However, the Karen Peace Support Network (KPSN), a network of nearly 30 ethnic Karen organizations, cautions JICA that its blueprint for infrastructure development such as roads and industrial estates in the war-torn southeast is premature and flawed, potentially exacerbating conflict in the region.

The KPSN (formerly KCBPSN) is the largest network of Karen civil society organizations in Burma/Myanmar. These organizations have been providing support for vulnerable people in this conflict-torn region for decades, striving to empower local communities, build transparent and accountable institutions, and help create a sustainable peace in Burma/Myanmar. KPSN and its member organizations are important stakeholders which must be included in any development planning process in the Karen areas of the southeast […]

အခ်ိဳးက် ကုိယ္စားျပဳစနစ္(PR)ကို ျပည္နယ္မ်ားမပါ တုိင္းေဒသၾကီးမ်ားတြင္သာ က်င့္သုံးေရးဆုိင္ရာ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမုိကေရစီအင္အားစု NDF ပါတီ အေနျဖင့္ ဇြန္လ ပထမပတ္ တြင္ အမ်ိဳးသား လႊတ္ေတာ္၌ အခ်ိဳးက်ကိုယ္စားျပဳစနစ္ PR က်င့္သုံးေရးကို ျပည္နယ္ မ်ားတြင္မပါဘဲ၊ တုိင္းေဒသၾကီးမ်ားတြင္သာ က်င့္သုံးရန္ အဆိုျပဳခဲ့ပါသည္။

၂။ NDF ပါတီအေနျဖင့္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ကာလကပင္ ပီအာစနစ္ကုိ က်င့္သုံးရန္ ျပည္သူ႔ လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ တင္ျပခဲ့သည္ […]

The Elders: Myanmar’s Grassroots Should Have a Role in National Reforms, Peace Talks

The Elders encourage the government of Myanmar to strive for greater inclusiveness, to overcome decades of mistrust within society and reflect the full diversity and talents of Myanmar’s population […]

Council Conclusions on the Comprehensive Framework for the European Union’s Policy and Support to Myanmar/Burma

The Council adopted the following conclusions:

“The Council welcomes and endorses the attached Comprehensive Framework consisting of priorities for the European Union’s policy and support in the next three years to the on-going reforms in Myanmar/Burma. This Framework sets forth EU’s goals and priorities geared towards building a lasting partnership and promoting closer engagement with the country as a whole […]

Sustaining Myanmar’s Transition: Ten Critical Challenges

A new Asia Society report takes stock of progress and challenges in Myanmar’s reform process over the past two years and thinks through ways forward for U.S.-Myanmar relations […]