People of ASEAN Stand Up To Be Counted

The ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN People’s Forum (ACSC/APF) 2014, held in Rangoon, Burma, on 21-23 March, and co-organised by long-standing Burma advocates to ASEAN, namely Burma Partnership, Task Force on ASEAN and Burma, and Women’s League of Burma, together with 80 other civil society organizations (CSOs) and community based organizations (CBOs), can be hailed as a great success as well as a historic event. Not only was it the first ACSC/APF to be held in Burma, it was also the highest attended ACSC/APF since the ACSC/APF first took place in 2005, with over 3,000 participants. It was a great opportunity for people of all ethnic nationalities from across Burma – CSOs, CBOs, rights activists networks, and grassroots activists – to meet people from their own countries and from others around the ASEAN region as well as from Timor leste and beyond, to share their concerns, and above all, to demonstrate the strength and solidarity of civil society in Burma and in ASEAN[…]

Significant Constitutional Changes are a Must for Genuine Democracy

As the timeframe for submission to the parliamentary Joint Committee for Reviewing the Constitution enters its final month, pressure to amend this flawed document is ratcheting up. Opposition parties, ethnic armed groups, democracy activists, members of the public and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi are all voicing how imperative it is for democracy that the constitution is changed.

The 2008 Constitution, which the military regime introduced after a sham referendum in 2008, entrenches the Burma Army in positions of power, gives the state the ownership of all land in the country, and denies Burma’s ethnic nationalities equality and the right to self-determination. It also fails on grounds of inclusiveness, omitting to protect and respect the human rights of all people in Burma, regardless of race, religion or color. It is undemocratic, illegitimate and a major hurdle for progress in Burma’s reform process […]

အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ ေၾကညာခ်က္ စာအမွတ္ ၁၄၁ (စည္း)/၁၂/၂၀၁၃

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံသပေဒကို ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲရန္ လိုအပ္ေနေၾကာင္း ျပည္သူအမ်ားက ဆႏၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ေနၾကသည့္အျပင္ အစိုးရ၊ လႊတ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးပါတီမ်ားကလည္း ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးကို လိုလားေနၾကပါသည္ […]

BURMA: Speaker of Legislature Puts State Sovereignty Ahead of Torture Elimination

On 21 March 2013 a member of the national legislature in Burma introduced a motion calling for the country to join the United Nations Convention against Torture. In his motion, Dr Aung Moe Nyo, member of the National League for Democracy for Pwintbyu, Magway Region, argued that as the country is now developing and democratising in accordance with international standards it would be appropriate to join the convention […]

The Elders Congratulate Aung San Suu Kyi Ahead of Her Appearance in Parliament in Burma/Myanmar

The Elders congratulate Aung San Suu Kyi ahead of her first appearance in the Burma/Myanmar parliament, following her election in the 1 April by-elections. They hope her access to political office will further boost political, economic and social reform in Burma/Myanmar […]

NLD’s Victory A Step Forward But Sanctions Must be Maintained Until Genuine Reforms Under Way

The past week has seen much celebrating from people throughout Burma and around the world over the election of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and 42 additional members of the National League for Democracy. These results marked a moment of excitement and hope for the people of Burma. However, the many irregularities in the process and the continued numerous restrictions on people’s fundamental freedoms demonstrate that a great deal more progress needs to be made on Burma’s path towards genuine democracy.

As Soe Aung, Deputy Secretary for Foreign Affairs of Forum for Democracy in Burma, noted in an opinion piece earlier this week, “[G]enuine change must be defined by bold institutional, legislative and policy reforms that can decisively create a truly democratic, inclusive and accountable government based on the rule of law and respect for all human rights. For the majority of people in Burma, there has been little real change. The quasi-civilian administration has made small gestures calculated to generate maximum excitement in the international community with minimum cost to high-ranking officials and their cronies.” […]

Election Monitoring Re port No.1

The April 1 by-election generally went well. People could genuinely express their own voices through their own votes. While the process was significantly peaceful in all the 45 contested constituencies with a total of 158 candidates, some irregularities […]

Burma’s By-Elections Results ‘A Step Forward, But There Is Still a Long Way to Go’

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), a UK-based human rights group, has told the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net) that it welcomes the results of yesterday’s parliamentary by-elections in Burma, as preliminary reports indicated that Nobel Peace Prize […]

Burma’s Democracy Movement Enters into the New Playing Field by Winning at least 39 Seats in the By-Lection, Yet Still Full of Landmines, Barriers, and Biased-Referees

Burma’s democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said during a press conference on March 30, 2012 “What has been happening in this country is really beyond what is acceptable for a democratic election. Still, we are determined to go forward because we think that is what our people want […]

Burma’s By-Elections: Still Short of International Standards

While the by-elections have limited political significance, they are important because they are being championed as an indicator of progress by the international community after the sham 2010 polls. Despite the hype, the bulk of laws and regulations […]