Dispatches: What Burma’s Census Missed

The preliminary results of Burma’s first nationwide census since 1983 were released in Rangoon last Saturday, providing an answer to the vexing question of the actual population, estimates of which varied between 44 to 59 million for a decade. The new tally (minus some low-population areas of northern Karen State and Kachin State not included because of security concerns) is 51.4 million […]

Multi-Faith Network Urges Secretary Kerry to Raise Religious Freedom Violations with Burmese Government

Members of the US-based International Religious Freedom (IRF) Roundtable, a multi-faith informal group of organizations and individuals advocating for freedom of religion or belief, have written to US Secretary of State John Kerry ahead of his visit to Burma, urging him make it a priority to discuss reported violations of freedom of religion or belief with the government […]

USCIRF Deeply Concerned by Draft “Religious Conversion Law” in Burma

Washington, D.C. – The draft of the ill-advised “Religious Conversion Law” which Burma’s parliament released for public comment would further restrict religious freedom in a country considered one of the worst by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The May 27 draft responds to Burmese U Thein Sein’s request that parliament consider four laws demanded by a Buddhist organization connected to the nationalist movement known as “969.” The drafting committee will receive suggestions until June 20, 2014, and then will submit a draft law on conversion to the parliament […]

United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2014 Annual Report

Political reforms in Burma have not improved legal protections for religious freedom and have done little to curtail anti-Muslim violence, incitement and discrim¬ination, particularly targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority. Police failed to intervene effectively and the government has taken inadequate steps to address the underlying causes of sectarian violence or hold individ¬uals fully accountable. State-sponsored discrimination and state-condoned violence against Rohingya and Kaman ethnic Muslim minorities also continued, and ethnic minority Christians faced serious abuses during recent military incursions in Kachin state. Based on these systematic, egregious, ongoing violations, USCIRF continues to recommend that Burma be designated as a “country of particular concern,” or CPC, in 2014. The State Department has designated Burma a CPC since 1999 […]

CSW Calls on UN General Assembly to Address Violations of Freedom of Religion or Belief in Burma

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) today urged the United Nations General Assembly to focus on continuing violations of human rights, including abuses of freedom of religion or belief, in the forthcoming annual resolution on Burma.

While significant changes have taken place in Burma during the past two years, including the release of many political prisoners, the participation of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Parliament, increased space for civil society, political actors and the media, and the agreement of fragile, preliminary ceasefires with most armed ethnic resistance organisations, grave violations of human rights continue to be perpetrated, in particular against religious and ethnic minorities […]

CSW Urges UK to Put Human Rights at the Heart of Burmese President’s Visit

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) today urged the British Government to ensure that continuing grave violations of human rights, including freedom of religion or belief, are put at the heart of discussions with Burma’s President Thein Sein during his visit to the United Kingdom next week […]

အမ်ဳိးေစာင့္ဥပေဒ မူၾကမ္းတင္သြင္းရန္ၾကိဳးပန္းမႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လ ၁၃ ရက္ ေန႕တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေသာ မ်ဳိးေစာင့္ဥပေဒဆိုင္ရာ အၾကိဳညွိႏႈိင္းပြဲမွ ဗုဒၶဘာသာင္ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအား ဘာသာျခားႏွင့္ အိမ္ေထာင္ျပဳျခင္းကို ကန္႕သတ္သည့္ ဥပေဒမူၾကမ္းကို တရား၀င္အတည္ျပဳႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ကို တင္ျပမည့္အစီအစဥ္ကို ေၾကညာခဲ့သည္ […]

PHR Issues Report Documenting Massacre in Burma; Calls for Immediate Investigation

PHR today released a report detailing the organized attacks against Muslims that took place in central Burma in late March and resulted in the killing of at least 20 children and four teachers. The report provides evidence that state authorities, who idly stood by watching the events unfold, are complicit in these crimes. The rights group also issued policy recommendations […]

CSW Urges European Union to Prioritise Human Rights in Burma, Despite Lifting Sanctions

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) today urged the European Union (EU) to ensure that continuing grave violations of human rights, including religious freedom, in Burma, remain a priority, despite the decision yesterday to lift all EU sanctions on Burma apart from the arms embargo […]

Human Rights Violations Perpetrated Against the Chin in Burma (March 2011 – March 2013)

Documentation from human rights groups shows that in fact, serious human rights violations continue across the country under President Thein Sein’s government, with particularly severe consequences for ethnic and religious minorities. For the predominantly Christian Chin people, this includes violations of religious freedom, forced labour, sexual violence, and extra-judicial killing, despite the fact that a ceasefire between armed resistance group the Chin National Front (CNF) and the government is holding […]