Time for a Paris-Principles Compliant National Human Rights Commission in Myanmar

The Asian NGO Network on National Human Rights Institutions (ANNI), together with its member, Burma Partnership (BP) deplores recent actions taken by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) in urging the victims in a high-profile child torture case to pursue financial settlement instead of proper legal action. ANNI and BP also wish to reiterate the need to further strengthen the Commission in order to fully comply with the Paris Principles […]

Open letter to President regarding Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Reform

ေအာက္ပါလက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးထားေသာ မိမိတို႔အရပ္ဘက္အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားမွ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၂ ရက္ ေန႔စြဲျဖင့္ သမၼတရံုးမွ ျပည္ထဲေရးဝန္ႀကီးဌာနမွ အင္းဝစက္ခ်ဳပ္ဆိုင္ပိုင္ရွင္မ်ား၏ ညႇင္းပန္းႏွိပ္စက္ခံ အိမ္အကူ အမ်ိဳးသမီးငယ္ ႏွစ္ဦးျဖစ္ေသာ မ ( စန္းေကခိုင္ ) ႏွင့္ မ ( မသဇင္ ) တို႔ႏွင့္ အမႈဖြင့္တိုင္ၾကားခဲ့သူ Myanmar Now သတင္းေထာက္ ကို ( ကိုေဆြဝင္း ) တို႔ကို လံုျခံဳေရး ယူေပးရန္ လည္းေကာင္း၊ လူ/ကယ္/ျပန္ဝန္ႀကီးဌာနမွ အမ်ိဳးသမီးငယ္ႏွစ္ဦး လံုျခံဳစြာေနႏိုင္ေရးႏွင့္ စိတ္ပိုင္း ႏွင့္ ရုပ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ ႏွစ္သိမ့္အားေပးမႈမ်ား လုပ္ေဆာင္ ရန္လည္းေကာင္း ညႊန္ၾကားခ်က္ထုတ္ျခင္းအေပၚ ေထာက္ခံႀကိဳဆိုပါသည္။ သက္ဆိုင္ရာဝန္ႀကီးဌာနမ်ားမွလည္း သမၼတႀကီး၏ လမ္းညႊန္ခ်က္အတိုင္း အခ်ိန္ႏွင္တစ္ေျပးညီ ေဆာင္ရြက္ၾကမည္ဟု မိမိတို႔မွ ေမၽွာ္လင့္ပါသည္ […]

Latest Human Rights Abuse Case Demonstrates Urgent Need to Reform the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission

This past week, the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) sparked outrage for failing to provide an adequate response to a case involving the abuse of two young domestic helpers in Rangoon. The victims, Ma San Kay Khaing, 17, and Ma Tha Zin, 16 reported being both physically and psychologically abused by members of the family-owned Ava tailoring shop that employed them […]

Migrants: Justice and Koh Tao Murder Case

Prior to British tourists Hannah Witheridge and David Miller’s heinous murders last September, migrant worker’s presence and everyday lives on Koh Tao island were not publicly discussed. This situation abruptly changed once migrants were identified by case investigators as key suspects behind the killings […]

Justice: Koh Tao Murder Case – Fundraising Campaign Launched To Support Defendants Fair Trial

The Migrant Worker Rights Network (MWRN), representing migrant workers in Thailand, has today launched an appeal to support an adequate defense, by appointed lawyers, of two Myanmar migrant workers accused of gang rape and murder of two British tourists on Koh Tao Island, Thailand in September 2014. The fundraising campaign comes amidst widespread concerns regarding the possible arrest of scapegoats in this case who didn’t commit acts of murder or rape. […]

Statement on Consultation Organized by Border-based Civil Society Organisations with the Nationwide Ceasefire Coordination Team (NCCT)

On November 22-23, 2014, 42 representatives of 25 border-based civil society organisations (CSOs), working on education, health, media, migrant workers’ rights, refugees, the environment, women’s issues and human rights, held a consultation meeting with the NCCT. This was the first such meeting with the NCCT held formally by a broad grouping of border-based CSOs. […]

Displaced Communities Await Political Dialogue in Myanmar

Bangkok/Yangon – As Myanmar’s government prepares to host the ASEAN Summit next week, conflict-affected communities are wondering if and how the peace process can get back on track. Negotiations for a nationwide ceasefire agreement are stumbling and national elections are due at the end of 2015. However, political dialogue to address ethnic conflict is essential to promote national reconciliation according to a new report from a consortium of relief and development agencies. […]

Demanding Justice for Migrant Arakanese Youths, Demonstration in Front of Thai Consulate in New York

Around 30 Burmese nationals, most of them are Arakanese , staged a demonstration in front of Thai Consulate in New York on Friday demanding justice to two Arakanese migrant workers, who were detained in Thailand in a murder case there, said Ko Khaing Ba Khine, one of the organizers of the event in America.

The demonstrators, who assembled in front of the Consulate General of Thailand for two hours beginning on 2 pm, urged the Thai government in Bangkok to scrutinize the case fairly, where the two Arakanese youths have been accused of murdering two British citizens namely David Miller (25 years old) and Hannah Witheridge (23) […]

Protesters Call for Fair Trial of Myanmar Suspects in Murder of British Tourists

A small crowd of protesters took to the streets of Yangon on the occasion of the Thai premier’s visit to demonstrate on behalf of the two Myanmar migrant workers accused of murdering two British tourists on the Thai holiday island of Koh Tao.

Nay Myo Zin, a former military captain and political prisoner organized the demonstration in front of Yangon City Hall between 8 and 9 am October 10 to call for a free and fair trial by the Thai authorities of Myanmar nationals Zaw Lin and Win Zaw Htun, both 21 […]

Smattering of Rangoon Protesters Greet Thai PM Over Koh Tao Murder Case

RANGOON — A smattering of Burmese activists held two days of protests against the arrest of a pair of Burmese migrants accused of murdering two tourists on southern Thailand’s Koh Tao island last month, as Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha arrived in Rangoon on Friday for the second day of his first overseas trip since taking the helm of the military-ruled country.

A group of about 20 Burmese led by the Movement for Democracy Current Force held a protest and prayer vigil at downtown Rangoon’s Sule Pagoda on Thursday evening, holding placards that urged the former general turned prime minister “to let the accused two Burmese receive the benefit of the doubt.” […]