Human Rights Far From Guaranteed as US Sanctions on Burma Are Removed

During his meeting with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on September 14 2016, President Barack Obama announced that the United States would end sanctions on Burma. Earlier in the week, White House deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes anticipated the easing of sanctions, stating, “We want to make sure our sanctions are not preventing the type of economic development and investment that would help the people of Myanmar […]”

EU Must Call Rohingya People “Rohingya”

As organisations representing Rohingya people in 9countries, we express our deep concern and disappointment at the decision by the European Union not to use our name when referring to us […]

Taking the EU-Myanmar Partnership to the Next Level: An EU Strategy in Support of Myanmar’s Reforms

The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the European Commission have today adopted a Joint Communication that sets out a vision for ambitious and forward-looking EU engagement with Myanmar as the country’s transition enters its next phase […]

Investment Protection Agreement Myanmar – EU

We, Myanmar Civil Society Organizations working on a variety of sectors ranging, are writing to you in your capacity as European Union Commissioner for Trade, mandated with the responsibility for negotiating bilateral trade agreement with key countries […]

ျမန္မာ-ဥေရာပသမဂၢ (အီးယူ) ရင္းႏွီးျမွပ္ႏွံမႈ အကာအကြယ္ေပးေရး သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ (IPA)ႏွင့္ သက္ေရာက္မႈ ေမးခြန္းလႊာအေပၚ ျမန္မာ အရပ္ဘက္ လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား၏ ထုုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

ျမန္မာအရပ္ဖက္လူမႈအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ားသည္ ျမန္မာ-ဥေရာပသမဂၢ (အီးယူ) ရင္းႏွီးျမွပ္ႏွံမႈ အကာအကြယ္ ေပးေရး သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ (IPAကိုု ၂၀၁၄ခုုႏွစ္မွစ၍ အထူးဂရုျပဳ ေလ့လာေနခဲ့ပါသည္။ ျမန္မာ-ဥေရာပသမဂၢ ရင္းႏွီးျမွပ္ႏွံမႈအကာအကြယ္ေပးေရး သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ (IPA) ၏သက္ေရာက္မႈ ႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ေသာ ေမးခြန္းလႊာကိုု Development Solutions ဟုုေခၚေသာ ေအဂ်င္စီတစ္ခုုမွ ေပးပိုု႔ခဲ့ ပါသည္။ ထုုိေအဂ်င္စီကိုု ဥေရာပသမဂၢမွ ငွားရမ္းထားေသာ္လည္း ”ဥေရာပေကာ္မရွင္၏ တရားဝင္ ရပ္တည္ခ်က္ကို ကိုယ္စားမျပဳ” ဟုဆိုသျဖင့္ ဥေရာပ သမဂၢ ကုုန္သြယ္ေရး ေကာ္မရွင္နာ ထံသုုိ႔ စာေရးသားေပးပိုု႔ခဲ့ပါသည္ […]

UN General Assembly Resolution on Burma – No Practical Action to End Abuses

Burma Campaign UK today described the draft UN General Assembly Resolution on the situation of human rights in Burma as not reflecting the scale and seriousness of the human rights situation on the ground, or the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar […]

Statement by the Spokesperson on the Legislative Passage of the “Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage Bill” in Myanmar

The Myanmar Parliament has passed the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage Bill, the second of four in a package of laws referred to as the “race and religion protection bills” […]

Burma: Action Urged On Stranded Rohingya Refugees

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) has called on the British government to press for EU Foreign Ministers meeting today to discuss the case of Rohingya refugees who are currently stranded in the Andaman Sea […]

Hammond Urged To Mobilise EU Over Rohingya Refugee Crisis

Burma Campaign UK today called on Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond to ensure that EU Foreign Ministers discuss the Rohingya refugee crisis when they meet on Monday. The European Union should apply pressure on Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia to stop pushing boats of Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshis back out to sea […]

Time for Honesty Around Peace and Conflict

Peace talks resumed after a six month hiatus between the Burma Governments’ Union Peace-making Work Committee (UPWC) and the alliance of ethnic armed groups, the Nationwide Ceasefire Coordination Team (NCCT). Yet in an extraordinary display of hypocrisy, the Burma Army began airstrikes again against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), just as the talks paused for a week-long break. This is to complement the airstrikes currently targeting the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in northern Shan State.

The Burma Government, through its proxies the UPWC and the Myanmar Peace Center, consistently attempts to dominate the discourse surrounding the peace talks, eschewing positive conclusions whenever talks happen. Time and time again the media is told that the signing of a nationwide ceasefire accord (NCA) is ‘just round the corner,’ or in this case, ‘within days.’ How can the signing of the NCA be within days if the Burma Army has opened two fronts on its war against ethnic armed groups? Furthermore, although the MNDAA is part of the NCCT, they have been excluded from the most recent peace talks, with the Government and the Burma Army steadfastly refusing to consider any method of engagement with them apart from through military means. There needs to be honesty from the government on the realities of the prospects for peace so that parties concerned, including the donors and civil society, are able to contribute and help steer the process instead of losing trust in it […]