Vice Chair Crowley Extremely Concerned About Burmese Government’s Arrest of Peaceful Activists

(Queens, NY) – Today, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-Queens, the Bronx), Vice Chair of the Democratic Caucus and a leader in the House of Representatives on Burma, released the following statement in response to the Burmese government’s arrest and charging of two peaceful activists for peacefully exercising their freedom of speech […]

Myanmar: Immediately Release Two People Detained for Mocking Army on Facebook

Myanmar’s authorities must immediately and unconditionally release a peace activist and a young woman who have been arrested for mocking the country’s army chief on Facebook, Amnesty International said […]

Myanmar: Hold police Accountable for Crackdown at Letpadan, Free Wrongfully Imprisoned Protesters

(YANGON—October 10, 2015) Myanmar police officers used excessive force during a crackdown on protesters and arrested more than 100 individuals in Letpadan, Bago Region in March, according to a new report released today by Fortify Rights and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic (“the Clinic”). Authorities should release individuals wrongfully detained for exercising their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, the organizations said […]

‘Going back to the old ways’: A new generation of prisoners of conscience in Myanmar

A new Amnesty International briefing – ‘Back to the old ways’ – exposes how repression has drastically picked up pace over the past two years, in stark contrast to official claims that not a single person is imprisoned for peacefully exercising their rights […]

Freedom of Expression, Religion and Belief: As Freedom of Expression Shrinks, Discrimination is on the Rise

In the lead-up to the 2015 elections in Burma, religious minorities, especially the Muslim population, have been consistently subjected to state sponsored discrimination and violent abuse, while simultaneously denied representation in the political sphere or in civil society […]

Statement No.(11/2015) Statement regarding the Application of bail for the (4 )Student Demonstrators of Yadanarpon University, Mandalay Region to Appear for the Examination Statement

According to the information appearing in the media it was learnt that 3rd year Biochemistry student Ko Naing Ye Wai, 3rd Year Microbiology, Ko Jit Too, 4th Year Physics, Ko Aung San Oo and 4th year Maths, Ko Nyan Linn Htet are students currently studying at the Yadanarpon University […]

Statement No. (12/2015)ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ ၁၀-၃-၂၀၁၅ တြင္ လက္ပံတန္းျမိဳ႔၍ အမ်ိဳးသား ပညာေရးဥပေဒ ျပင္ဆင္ေပးေရးအတြက္ ဆႏၵျပေသာ သပိတ္စစ္ေၾကာင္းအား ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲတပ္ဖဲြ႔မွ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခဲ့မႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ၁၀-၃-၂၀၁၅ ေန႔တြင္ ပဲခူးတုိင္းေဒသၾကီး၊ လက္ပံတန္းျမိဳ႔၌ အမ်ိဳးသားပညာေရးဥပေဒျပင္ဆင္ေရးအတြက္ ဆႏၵျပခဲ့ေသာ သပိတ္စစ္ေၾကာင္းအား ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔မွ ဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းခဲ့ရာတြင္ တာ၀န္အရလုပ္ေဆာင္ျခင္းထက္ ပိုလြန္၍ေဆာင္ရြက္ေၾကာင္း၊ အသက္အႏၱရာယ္ထိခုိက္ေစႏိုင္သည့္ ေနရာမ်ားကို ရုိက္ႏွက္ေၾကာင္း၊ အဓိကရုဏ္း ႏွိမ္းႏွင္းေရး အဆင့္မ်ားအတိုင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္မႈမရွိေၾကာင္း၊ အခ်ိဳ႔ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ႔၀င္မ်ားက အမိန္႔မနာခံဘဲ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေၾကာင္း၊ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ စုေ၀းျခင္းႏွင့္ စီတန္းလွည့္လည္ျခင္းဆုိင္ရာဥပေဒျဖင့္ တရားစြဲဆုိရမည့္အစား ရာဇသတ္ၾကီးဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မမ်ားျဖင့္ တရားစဲြဆုိေၾကာင္း သသည့္တုိင္တန္းခ်က္မ်ားကုိ မွတ္တမ္းတင္စာအုပ္စာတမ္းမ်ား၊ ဗြီဒီယိုတိပ္ေခြ မ်ားႏွင့္အတူ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္က ရရွိခဲ့ပါသျဖင့္ ေကာ္မရွင္အဖြဲ႔၀င္ ၃ ဦး ပါ၀င္ေသာ စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရးအဖဲြ႔ကုိ ဖဲြ႔စည္း၍ စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးခဲ့ပါသည္ […]

End of Mission Statement Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar

I conclude my third official visit to the country as Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar as the country is coming to grips with the scale of destruction and loss of human life caused by the floods. I conveyed my deepest sympathies and profound sadness to all those I met during the mission and wish to renew those sentiments publicly now and particularly to the families of the victims and all those who have been affected by this disaster […]

Myanmar: Prisoners of Conscience Released in Amnesty but Scores Remain Behind Bars

The release of at least 11 prisoners of conscience in a mass prisoner amnesty in Myanmar today is a step in the right direction, but authorities must immediately clear the country’s jails of the scores of peaceful activists who still remain behind bars, Amnesty International said […]

The Release of all Human Rights Defenders and Political Prisoners is a Benchmark for Free and Fair Elections

Burma Partnership and the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) released the joint report, “How to Defend the Defenders? A Report on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders in Burma and Appropriate Protection Mechanisms” on 25 July 2015. The report highlights the key threats that human rights defenders (HRDs) in Burma face, including oppressive legislation, a corrupt judiciary, violence and a lack of protection, as well as providing policy recommendations to relevant actors. The report points to a picture of a deteriorating human rights situation, in which the authorities are often the main perpetrators or are at least complicit in targeting, oppressing, stifling, controlling and silencing HRDs and the valuable work they carry out.

One of the key tools of repression used by the government, the report highlighted, was the use of Section 18 of the Right to Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession Act (the Assembly Law), among other pieces of legislation. As stated by Bo Kyi, Joint Secretary of AAPP, “The Assembly Law continues to be used extensively by the authorities as a tool to imprison and silence HRDs… the legal system is being used to develop and implement oppressive laws, a practice that signifies the real need for legislative and judicial reform in Burma.” […]