Indonesia Puts the Spotlight on Human Rights as ASEAN Chair

In its role chairman of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) this year, Indonesia says it will make human rights its top priority. At a news event Friday, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said his country hopes that during 2011, the ASEAN human rights commission will be more effective in fulfilling its mandate to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to respect the basic rights of human beings.

Placing Human Rights at the Forefront of Indonesia’s Chairmanship of ASEAN in 2011

In the beginning of 2011, KontraS, HRWG and FORUM-ASIA on behalf of the Solidarity of Asian People’s Advocacy (SAPA) Task Force on ASEAN and Human Rights (TFAHR), would like to welcome and highlight our demand for Indonesia’s Chairmanship of ASEAN this year on the promotion and protection of human rights in the ASEAN region.

Having branded as a democratic country with respect for human rights within national and international communities, there is a high expectation on Indonesia towards its Chairmanship of ASEAN this year […]

Human Rights and Burma Election 2010

လူ႕အခြင့္အရး ကာကြယ္ျမွင့္တင္သူမ်ားကြန္ယက္ (HRDP) မွထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ေသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေလ့လာသံုးသပ္ေရး အစီရင္ခံစာသည္ ၂၀၁၀ ျမန္မာ့ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ကာလသံုးပိုင္းခြဲကာ စစ္ေဆးသံုးသပ္ထားသည္ […]

Burma’s Chin People Face Continuing Poverty and Human Rights Violations in Aftermath of Sham Election

Forced labour, religious discrimination and acute poverty continue to cause intense suffering in Chin State, western Burma, according to testimonial evidence received by a delegation led by Baroness Cox, Chief Executive of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART), which returned last week from the India-Burma border […]

Burma: Visit to the India-Burma Border

“We have been ruled by the army for 48 years. The army has killed our hopes.” – A Chin pastor

“The elections amount to nothing more than a change of clothes for the military. They are completely unacceptable.” – A Chin refugee

In eastern Burma, the regime is carrying out military offensives against ethnic civilians, resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people and rape, torture, forced labour and killings. Civilians, including women, children and the elderly, are sometimes shot at point-blank range. In western and northern Burma, the regime is also cruelly suppressing the ethnic nationalities, although the tactics vary […]

Silencing Dissent: The Ongoing Imprisonment of Burma’s Political Activists in the Lead up to the 2010 Elections

This AAPP’s report, Silencing Dissent, documents the ongoing imprisonment of political activists, individuals associated with activists, as well as ordinary civilians peacefully expressing their basic civil and political rights occurred during 2009 and 2010 […]

Intimidation, Imprisonment and Repression: The Road to Military Victory in the 2010 Elections

This 2010 Election report of ND-Burma is based on 247 cases researched throughout Burma. The report presents violations of Human Rights under 9 headings explaining how the military government has committed widespread violations to ensure victory of USDP party in the 2010 election […]

Accountability for serious crimes essential to sustainable peace and national reconciliation in Burma

Ahead of the general elections on November 7 in Burma, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the Burma Lawyers’ Council (BLC) are publishing the main interventions of their joint seminar held in Bangkok in May 2009, where leading exiled Burmese organisations, international and regional human rights NGOs, as well as renown international legal experts gathered to discuss the possibility of prosecuting the leaders of the military junta for the systematic and gross human rights violations perpetrated in Burma […]

Putting Women Migrant Workers into ASEAN

Putting Women Migrant Workers into ASEAN: Are they not already in ASEAN working in the export industries? Are they not already supporting the middle and upper classes of ASEAN by providing cleaning and child care services? Are they not already working in significant numbers in agriculture, horticulture, entertainment, food processing, sales and a host of other important work? Indeed, the labour of women migrant workers is already in ASEAN, but the rights, the dignity, and the respect for women migrant workers is not yet there. However, with several important human rights processes evolving at this time, it is valuable for migrant women to be aware of the current instruments and mechanisms that protect their rights and understand how to engage in these international and regional processes […]

Report on the Human Rights Situation in Burma: January – July 2010

This report provides up-to date information on human rights violations and highlights pressing issues and trends within the country including election-related human rights violations in the pre-election period […]