UN Review Shows Lack of Progress Made by the Outgoing Government

Burma/Myanmar’s response to its second cycle Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the United Nations Human Rights Council (the Council) reflects the lack of progress made by the outgoing government and the need for key human rights challenges to be addressed, representatives who attended the Council said today […]

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ဳိးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ (MNHRC) ၏ ၾသဇာသက္ေရာက္မႈႏွင့္ ထိေရာက္မႈ ေလ့လာေရး အထူးခရီးစဥ္မွ နိဂံုးခ်ဳပ္ ေၾကညာခ်က္

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ဳိးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ (MNHRC) ၏ ၾသဇာရွိန္ဝါႏွင့္ အက်ဳိးသက္ေရာက္မႈကို စံုစမ္း ေလ့လာရန္ (ႏုိင္ငံအဆင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အဖဲြ႔အစည္း) NHRI မ်ားဆိုင္ရာ အာရွ NGO ကြန္ယက္ (ANNI) ၏ အတြင္းေရးမႉးအဖြဲ႔ျဖစ္ေသာ အာရွလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးႏွင့္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးဖိုရမ္ (ဖိုရမ္-ေအးရွား)ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့အေရးပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ားအဖြဲ႔တို႔က ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ႏိုဝင္ဘာလ ၁၆ ရက္မွ ၁၈ ရက္ေန႔အထိ ပူးတြဲျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေသာ အခ်က္ အလက္ရွာေဖြေရး အစီအစဥ္မွာ ယေန႔ၿပီးဆံုးခဲ့ၿပီ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္အဖြဲ႔တြင္ ကိုးရီးယားသမၼတႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ဳိးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ ဥကၠဌေဟာင္းလည္းျဖစ္ ဆိုးလ္ၿမိဳ႕ အမ်ဳိးသားတကၠသိုလ္ ဥပေဒေက်ာင္း အၿငိမ္းစားပါေမာကၡလည္းျဖစ္သူ ပါေမာကၡ ကၽြန္းဝွန္ဟန္း၊ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ဳိးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ဥကၠဌ မစၥတာ ႏူးရ္ခုိလစၥ၊ ဖုိရမ္-ေအးရွားအဖြဲ႔၏ ႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ လုပ္ငန္းမန္ေနဂ်ာ မစၥဘက္တီ ယိုလန္ဒါႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့အေရး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ားအဖြဲ႔မွ စည္း႐ံုးလႈံ႔ေဆာ္ေရးႏွင့္ သုေတသနအရာရွိ မစၥတာ ဂ်ိဳးဆက္စ္ ကြမ္ တို႔ ပါဝင္ခဲ့သည္။ […]

MNHRC at the Crossroads; “Alibi” of the Government or Ally of the People?

Last week, a fact-finding mission comprised of the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (Forum-Asia) and Burma Partnership released a statement on the impact and effectiveness of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC). The statement reflected the conclusions drawn from a mission conducted from 16-18 November, 2015. The statement noted serious concerns relating to issues of credibility, a lack of adherence to the Paris Principles, a failure to engage with repressive legislation in Burma, and an inability to effectively counter widespread human rights abuses such as land confiscation […]

Media Advisory: Press Conference on the Performance of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission

FORUM-ASIA, as secretariat of the Asian NGO Network on NHRIs (ANNI), together with Burma Partnership, will undertake a fact-finding mission from 16-18 November 2015 to inquire into the impact and effectiveness of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) […]

Time for the Government to Accept the Reality of Human Rights Problems, Take Effective Measures and Move Forward

Today, Burma/Myanmar’s human rights situation was reviewed by the United Nations Human Rights Council Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in Geneva. The report of the Myanmar Government’s delegation includes details of government activities to fulfill their commitments from the first UPR cycle but fails to take note serious ongoing human rights violations and challenges into account […]

Realities of a Worsening Human Rights Situation Must be Addressed by the Universal Periodic Review

(Geneva – 8 October 2015) Today 14 civil society organisations from the Burma-Myanmar Universal Periodic Review Forum and its partner civil society organisations from Burma/Myanmar urged the Myanmar Government to uphold its human rights obligations and implement the commitments it made during the first cycle of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in 2011.

The delegates addressed diplomats during UPR Info’s UPR Pre-Session in Geneva and urged them to make informed recommendations during this year’s UPR to reflect the local voices that are critical in driving the country towards a genuine democracy that respects and promotes human rights […]

Burma: Human Rights Council urges Burma to address human rights violations but overlooks suppression of student protests

The 28th session of the UN Human Rights Council today passed, by consensus, resolution 28/21 entitled ‘Situation of Human Rights Myanmar’ and extended by one year the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar […]

28th Regular Session of the UN Human Rights Council: Oral Statement Delivered by Khin Ohmar on behalf of Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA)

Thank you, Mr. President. FORUM-ASIA, in solidarity with Equality Myanmar and Burma Partnership welcomes the Special Rapporteur’s report […]

Statement on Government Policy on Return and Resettlement of Exiled Activists and Political Forces

After the 2010 elections and during the early days of the reform process, President U Thein Sein’s Government invited Burma/Myanmar diaspora communities, including exiled activists and political forces from different parts of the world who left the country for various reasons, to return to their motherland […]

The Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Continues Failing to Deliver

A report authored by Burma Partnership and Equality Myanmar was launched on 25 September 2014 in Rangoon revealing the continuing ineffectiveness of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) as well as the lack of independence from the government. The report was launched on the same day that a reshuffle of the members of MNHRC was announced by the government, which came as a complete surprise to civil society organizations due to the lack of consultation.

Released at the Myanmar Journalists Network in Rangoon, Burma: All the President’s Men, contributed to the annual Asian NGO Network on National Human Rights Institutions (ANNI) Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia (2014). The report analyzes the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Law 2014 enacted in March this year (enabling law) that institutionalizes the mandate of the MNHRC. The report finds that the law does not guarantee independence from the government and in particular, the president’s office. In contravention of international standards on national human rights institutions, namely the Paris Principles, the selection process does not adequately consult with civil society. As the report points out, “It is up to the selection board to come up with procedures for short-listing candidates, yet the enabling law itself should set out the process/procedure for selection, with consultations with civil society.” The members of the MNHRC are actually chosen by a selection board of ten, five of which are from the government or are government-affiliated. The enabling law states that two members of this board are to come from civil society organizations and a further two are to be MP, yet there is no transparency regarding the procedures under which the two MPs are chosen. Additionally, the chosen civil society members to the selection board are restricted to registered civil society only, thus excluding many outspoken and critical political and human rights groups who feel they cannot register under the current climate […]