President U Thein Sein: Immediately Investigate and Bring to Justice the Police Responsible for Grave Crimes Committed Against Peaceful Demonstrators

AAPP strongly condemns the use of excessive force and brutality by police officers in response to peaceful protestors in the early hours of 29 November, 2012. The government of President U Thein Sein must ensure […]

BURMA: Absurd and Offensive Pretext to Remove Demonstrators Opposed to Mining Project

In the latest turn of events in the struggle against the Letpadaung copper mining project in upper Burma, about which the Asian Human Rights Commission has been campaigning since mid-2012, the government has issued an announcement ordering that demonstrators abandon their protest sites or face criminal action […]

Authorities Arrest Mine Activists

Police are on the hunt for four others as Burma cracks down on protests at a controversial copper mine.

Burmese authorities have arrested at least six activists and are searching for four others who organized protests at the site of a China-backed copper mining venture, which villagers say had been set up on their illegally confiscated land.

The government has also ordered protesters to leave the Letpadaung Copper Mine’s premises in northwestern Burma by midnight or face legal action […]

AHRC Expresses Solidarity with Protesting Farmers

The Asian Human Rights Commission on Wednesday sent a message of support to farmers and their allies gathering for a “people’s conference” to oppose land confiscation and degradation for a copper mining project […]

Both Sides File Suits in Mine Protest

Over 1,000 villagers staged a symbolic demonstration on Tuesday at a graveyard to dramatize their struggle against a Chinese co-owned mine in the Letpadaung mountain range near Sagaing Division’s Monywa city.

The villagers are protesting their displacement from land following months of confrontations with the company and the authorities […]

Mining, Repression and Imprisonment, an Uncertain Future

Burma has been internationally praised for moving in a more democratic direction recently. Sadly for many citizens these changes are a world away. Their interactions with the Burma government are characterized by the same repressive, corrupt, strong armed tactics that made Burma an international pariah for decades.

In the Letpadaung mountains, huge amounts of land have been forcibly confiscated by the government, environmental degradation has occurred and a policy of arrest and detention of peaceful protestors has been implemented. The Monywa Copper Project is located in central Burma’s Sagaing Division with four large deposits: Sabetaung, Sabetaung South, Kyisintaung and Letpadaung. The project covers almost 8,000 acres of land, the majority of which was forcibly taken from villagers.

Resource extraction has been the cause of some of Burma’s largest human rights violations and land confiscations. The Monywa Copper Project is the country’s largest mine in terms of recovery rates, production and revenue. Protests over the project and national attention have been growing, as have the number of arrests and detentions in association with those protests and land confiscation cases.

ေျမသိမ္းတိုက္ပြဲ

4,000 local people and representatives of civil society organizations and networks launched a protest against copper mining in Latpantaung area on 5 September 2012 and called for the full termination of the mining project. Protesters included farmers whose lands have been confiscated […]

၅.၉.၂၀၁၂ ရက္ေန႕ ေျမသိမ္းတိုက္ပြဲ (၁၃) ရက္ေန႕ေျမာက္ေန႕တြင္ ေဒသခံျပည္သူမ်ားမွ မံုရြာ-ပုသိမ္လမ္းဆံု၌ ေန႕လည္ (၁၁း၀၀) နာရီမွ စတင္ကာ ဆႏၵျပမႈမ်ားကို စတင္ခဲ့ျပီး လက္ပန္ေတာင္းေတာင္ ေၾကးနီစီမံကိန္း လံုးဝရပ္ဆိုင္းရန္ ဆႏၵကို ထုတ္ေဖာ္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။ လက္ပန္ေတာင္းေတာင္ ေဒသတြင္ လက္ပန္ေတာင္းေတာင္ ေၾကးနီစီမံကိန္းေၾကာင့္ […]

Gold Miners Claim Victory After Demands Granted

More than a thousand gold miners called off a weeks-long protest on Thursday after their demands to restart work were granted by their parent company.

“The company agreed to 95 percent of our demands. Finally we achieved what we deserve and will call off the protest and will leave the area late this evening,” said Than Lwin, one of the miners […]

Thousands of Miners Protest Government Order

Thousands of miners in Mandalay division’s Yamethin township rallied after an order from the Ministry of Mining demanding the suspension of all mining operations across the country left them jobless […]

Lahu Women Demand End to Destructive Platinum Mining in Burma’s Shan State

A Lahu women’s group is calling for an immediate end to destructive platinum mining operations in Eastern Shan State. In a new report “Grab for White Gold: Impacts of platinum mining in Eastern Shan State,” the Lahu Women’s Organization (LWO) describes how recent platinum mining […]