A Return to the Bad Old Days for Freedom of Expression

In a scarcely believable and punishingly harsh act of repression, four journalists and the CEO of Unity journal were sentenced by a Magwe Region court on 10 July to ten years imprisonment with hard labor for reporting on a story on a chemical weapons factory, giving a damming indictment of press freedom in Burma today. This occurred just days after President Thein Sein described Burma as “one of the freest in Southeast Asia” due to media reforms.

In January 2014, Unity journal published an investigative report on a chemical weapons factory in Magwe Region, central Burma, with accounts from factory workers, local villagers and photos of the site. While the Burma government eventually admitted it is a ‘standard ordnance factory’ that produces ordinary military equipment, an analysis of the images by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies concludes that there is strong evidence that this isn’t just a normal arms factory, and is consistent with chemical weapons factories in other places, such as North Korea. It is ironic that the journalists who published a story on chemical weapons are jailed for ten years under the State Secrets Act, while the Burma government denies it is making chemical weapons. Related to this, a point that has been overlooked slightly over the past week is that Burma must implement the measures of the Chemical Weapons Convention that it signed in 1993 and thus clear up the issue of whether Burma does have the capability to manufacture such equipment, as the Unity journalists reported and are now in prison for. […]

Burma: State Leash on Media Freedoms at its End

With the passage of Burma’s Press Law in April this year, there had been a glimmer of hope that the case of the journalists from Unity Journal​ would be given a bit of protection for their daring expose of an alleged chemical weapons plant in the Magwe division last January.

After all, the new law guaranteed that no journalist may be jailed for doing her or his work […]

Police Investigations and Prosecutions Used to Harass News Media

Until recently, the media freedom situation in Burma was very promising but this is no longer the case. Reporters Without Borders is alarmed by the interrogation of many newspaper editors since 20 June and by the president’s recent expressions of hostility to freedom of information. In a threatening comment on 7 July, President Thein Sein said: “If there is any media that exploits media freedom and causes harm to national security rather than reporting for the sake of the country, effective legal action will be taken against that media.” […]

Burma: Four Reporters Sentenced to Lengthy Prison Terms

Paris, Bangkok: The conviction of four reporters to lengthy prison terms is the clearest sign of Burma’s backsliding on press freedom, FIDH and its member organization, the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN-Burma), said today. On 10 July, a court in Pakokku, Magwe Division, sentenced all four Unity Weekly reporters Lu Maw Naing, Yarzar Oo, Paing Thet Kyaw, and Sithu Soe and the Unity Weekly CEO Tint San to 10 years in prison with hard labor under the 1923 Official Secrets Act […]

Burma: Journalists Given 10 years’ Hard Labour for Article on Chemical Weapons Factory

The sentencing of five media workers in Myanmar each to 10 years’ imprisonment with hard labour for “disclosing state secrets” makes today a dark day for freedom of expression in the country, Amnesty International said.

A court in the town of Pakokku today handed down the sentences to four reporters and the CEO of the Unity newspaper – Lu Maw Naing, Yarzar Oo, Paing Thet Kyaw, Sithu Soe and Tint San […]

Unity Journalists’ Lawyer objects to Court Procedure

An eighth court hearing for the CEO and four reporters of Unity Weekly news journal took place at a court in the town of Pakokku on Monday morning.

The five were arrested after Unity published a report on 25 January alleging that a factory in Magwe Division was in fact secretly manufacturing chemical weapons. CEO Tint San and four reporters – Sithu Soe, Paing Thet Kyaw, Yazar Oo and Lu Maw Naing – were subsequently charged with violating the State Secrets Act […]

Win Tin’s Fight for Press Freedom and Democracy Goes On

Reporters Without Borders is deeply saddened to learn of the death of the dissident journalist Win Tinin Rangoon on 21 April. Burma has lost one of its staunchest defenders of democracy and freedom of information […]

Myanmar Parliament Passes Dual Media Laws

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has welcomed the passing of the country’s first press laws, but has also described elements of the two new laws as unnecessarily controlling. The IFJ also calls on the Thein Sein government to continue its dialogue with journalists if it is determined to develop a free and robust media […]

Public Consultation Meeting on Article 18 of Freedom of Assembly and Freedom of Procession Law

A public consultation meeting on Article 18 of Freedom of Assembly and Freedom of Procession Law was held on 6 November 2013 at the office of 88 Generation Peace and Open Society in Thingangyun Township, Yangon. The forum was attended by various types of civil society organizations including Human Rights and political activist […]

ပံုႏွိပ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ထုတ္ေ၀ျခင္း လုပ္ငန္း ဥပေဒၾကမ္းအား BNI ကန္႔ကြက္

ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္က ဇူလိုင္လ ၄ ရက္ေန႔က အတည္ျပဳလိုက္သည့္ ပံုႏွိပ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ထုတ္ေ၀ျခင္း လုပ္ငန္း ဥပေဒၾကမ္းကို တိုင္းရင္းသားမီဒီယာ အမ်ားစု ပါ၀င္ဖြဲ႕စည္း ထားသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ျမန္မာ့သတင္း (Burma News International- BNI) က ကန္႔ကြက္လိုက္ပါသည္။ “ဒီဥပေဒဟာ အစိုးရရဲ႕၀န္ၾကီးဌာန ျဖစ္တဲ့ ျပန္ၾကားေရး ၀န္ၾကီးဌာနကို သတင္းဌာနေတြရဲ႕ မွတ္ပံုုတင္ခြင့္ကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ေပးလိုက္တာ ျဖစ္တယ္” ဟု ဘီအဲန္အိုင္ အဖြဲ႔ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရး အရာရွိ နန္းေဖာ့ေဂ က ေျပာသည္ […]