An Open Letter to World Leaders on the Fourth Anniversary of The Resumption of War Calling Urgently for Humanitarian Aid for The Internally Displaced People of Northern Burma

On this fourth anniversary of the resumption of war against the Kachin people, the undersigned organisations call upon world leaders to strengthen their commitment to promoting peace and saving the lives, dignity and well-being of the Infernally […]

56 Solidarity Groups Worldwide Call for an Immediate Halt to All Military Offensives in Northern Burma/Myanmar and Unhindered Provision of Aid to Hundreds of Thousands of IDPs

(8 June 2015) On the fourth anniversary of the renewed war in Kachin State, 56 groups worldwide issued a statement in solidarity with the Kachin people by calling on the Burma Army to immediately halt all offensives in Kachin and northern Shan States and for the Burma/Myanmar Government to allow humanitarian agencies immediate and unhindered access to all internally displaced persons (IDPs) affected by the ongoing conflict […]

World Press Freedom Day or World Press Restrictions Day?

Sunday 3 May, 2015 was World Press Freedom Day and the Burma Army embraced the sentiment of this day by issuing a gaging order on the media, aimed at stopping them from reporting on statements by the ethnic armed group, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) with which the Burma Army is at war with. Meanwhile, 12 journalists remain in prison, demonstrating why the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) designated Burma as the 9^th most censored country in the world.

Five of the most high profile incarcerated media workers, four journalists and the chief executive officer of the Unity Journal, have been in prison since reporting on a secret chemical weapons factory of the Burma Army in January 2014. They are serving seven years with hard labor after being charged under the colonial-era State Secrets Act. International human rights group, Amnesty International, brought attention to this issue on World Press Freedom Day, encouraging supporters to post ‘#FreeUnityFive’ on the Burma Government’s Information Minister’s Facebook wall. It is not just the Unity five that are in prison. Seven more media workers spent World Press Freedom Day without their freedom, including five from the Bi-Midday Sun newspaper and two from the Myanmar Post Weekly […]

UN Secretary-General: Burma: ‘High Level of Impunity’ for Sexual Violence by ‘State Actors’

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has stated that there is: ‘a high level of impunity for conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated by State actors’ in a recently released report to the UN Security Council. The UN Secretary-General urged the government of Burma “…to ensure that security personnel accused of such crimes are prosecuted.” The report also stated that there is a ‘a lack of transparency in military courts.’ […]

Myanmar “Needs Urgently to Get Back on Track”

GENEVA (25 February 2015) – UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein today warned that Myanmar “seems headed in the wrong direction and needs urgently to get back on track” in a crucial year for the country’s democratic transition and long-term reconciliation […]

Myanmar: Prosecute Perpetrators, Not Human Rights Defenders Authorities Threaten Media & Critics for Implicating Military in Kachin Killings

(Yangon, February 3, 2015)— Myanmar authorities should stop prosecuting and threatening journalists and human rights defenders for reporting and speaking out about human rights abuses, Fortify Rights said today […]

ကခ်င္ခရစ္ယာန္ လုပ္အားေပး ဆရာမႏွစ္ဦးတို႔အား အဓမၼျပဳက်င့္ၿပီး လူမဆန္စြာ သတ္ျဖတ္မႈအေပၚ အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္၏ ေၾကညာခ်က္

More Murders, Same Patterns as Burma Army Acts with Impunity

Yet another astonishing act of barbarity was committed by the Burma Army as two young ethnic Kachin teachers were raped and murdered in a village in northern Shan State. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case as this incident once again demonstrates the impunity that protects the perpetrators of such cruel acts.

According to Kachin Women’s Association – Thailand, (KWAT) Burma Army troops had arrived in the village of Kawng Kha Shabuk, near the town of Muse, northern Shan State on the morning of 19 January 2015. They had previously been involved in military operations against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). In the early hours of the morning, villagers heard screaming from the church compound where the two teachers were staying. They went to check but could not ascertain what had happened. The next morning, a neighbor went to the compound to find the two teachers dead with signs of sexual assault and of being viciously beaten. Boot marks were found nearby their living quarters. According to KWAT, “There is strong circumstantial evidence that the rape and killing was carried out by the Burma Army troops which had arrived on January 19. These troops were stationed on guard around the village, and no one else would have dared carry out these crimes with the soldiers present.” […]

Religions for Peace Myanmar Statement on sexual violence against two Kachin teachers

Religions for Peace – Myanmar shared its deepest condolence with the bereaved family and is extremely saddened by the rape, torture and killing of Kachin Baptist Convention religious volunteer teachers – Maran Lu Ra and Tangbau Hkawn Nan Tsin, age 20 and 21 at Kawng Hka village, Pansan township, Muse District, Northern Shan State, on the night of 19 January, 2015. Religions for Peace – Myanmar strongly condemns such act of armed and sexual violence in the Christian church compound in Kawng Hka village and to any kind of armed violence […]

႐ွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပိုင္း၊ ေကာင္ခါေဘာက္႐ြာတြင္ ကခ်င္ႏွစ္ျခင္းအသင္းခ်ဳပ္ (KBC) မွ ေစတနာ့ဝန္ထမ္း ဆရာမႏွစ္ဦး အဓမၼျပဳက်င့္ အသတ္ခံရျခင္းအေပၚ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္( ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္ ပြင့္လင္းလူ႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္း) မွ ေပးပို႔ေသာ ဝမ္းနည္းေၾကာင္း သဝဏ္လႊာ

၁။ ၂ဝ၁၅ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဇန္နဝါရီလ (၁၉)ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ႐ွမ္းျပည္ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ေကာင္ခါေဘာက္ရြာရွိ ကခ်င္ႏွစ္ျခင္း အသင္းခ်ဳပ္ (KBC) မွ ေစတနာ့ဝန္ထမ္း ဆရာမႏွစ္ဦးျဖစ္ေသာ မရန္လုရာႏွင့္ တန္ေဘာင္ေခါန္နန္႔ဒင့္ တို႔ ႏွစ္ဦးမွာ အသင္းေတာ္ ဝင္းအတြင္း၌ပင္ အဓမၼျပဳက်င့္ အသတ္ခံရေၾကာင္း ၾကားသိရသည့္ အတြက္ ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔မွ ေၾကကြဲ တုန္လႈပ္မိပါသည္။ […]