By-Elections Must Not Be Seen as Benchmark of Reform

The international community, including many western governments, has indicated that it views the upcoming 1 April by-elections in Burma as a key benchmark in the country’s reform process and many have argued that a successful process should lead to the lifting of economic sanctions. However, free and fair balloting alone is insufficient to demonstrate that the by-elections have moved Burma into a period of true democracy because the process has been structured to maintain the military’s grip on power.

Only 48 seats in the Parliament, 7% of the total available parliamentary seats, are being contested in the by-elections. Those seats being contested are open predominantly because the individual originally elected to fill them, all of whom are members of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), was appointed to a position in the executive branch. Thus, only a small fraction of the country will be participating in this election and the vast majority of the people of Burma will continue to be represented by the individuals who supposedly won the 2010 elections, which were nothing more than a sham […]

Irregularities Tarnish the Credibility of Upcoming By-Elections

“The Special Rapporteur is concerned at continuing allegations of campaign irregularities and attemps to limit campaign activities,” stated Tomás Ojea Quintana in his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council released on Friday. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma further stressed that “the credibility of the elections will not be determined solely on the day of the vote, but on the basis of the entire process leading up and following election day.”

This report comes at the same time as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been alerting the Union Election Commission and the international community about the obstacles and restrictions that the NLD is facing on the campaign trail. Speaking after a meeting with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird on Thursday, Daw Suu said that official voter lists for next month’s by-elections include dead people and open the possibility for fraud […]

Launch of India-Burma Relations (1990-2011) Report & Interactive Session on Burma

Burma Centre Delhi (BCD) in collaboration with Journalist Forum Assam (JFA) organized “Interactive Session on Changing Policies in Burma: Opportunities and Challenges” at the Press Club, Guwahati, Assam […]

ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေၾကညာစာတမ္း

[…] အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္၏ ျပန္လည္မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္ရန္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ရျခင္း၏ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မ်ားမွာ (၁) တရားဥပေဒစိုးမိုးေရး (၂) ျပည္တြင္းျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရရွိေရး (၃) ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒကို ျပင္ဆင္ႏိုင္ေရးျဖစ္ေပသည္ […]

EU HR Ashton Delighted by NLD’s Decision to Re-register as a Political Party

I am delighted at the announcement by the National League for Democracy (NLD) that they are going to join to forthcoming by-elections in Myanmar (Burma). This is a courageous and welcome decision. Fair and transparent elections leading to a wider representation of the people in the Burmese […]

Calling the Regime’s Bluff

In a press conference today, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi spoke about the expected release of political prisoners and refrained from answering any questions about whether the National League for Democracy (NLD) would re-register as a political party. The party has recently held several internal meetings to discuss the pending decision about re-registration and the possibility of running in the by-elections to be held before the end of the year, and will meet again on 18 November. At the moment, it remains unclear what the NLD will decide.

While there has been a lack of transparency around the recent meetings between Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the regime, the two sides appear to be on unequal playing fields. It seems probable that the two sides have been negotiating next steps, with the regime using the release of remaining political prisoners as a bargaining chip for the re-registration of the NLD […]

Burma: Urge Prosecution of Policeman for Alleged Killing

The Asian Human Rights Commission has received information from sources in Burma about an alleged assault by a police officer resulting in the death of a young man. According to the information so far received, Ko Naing Win died of head injuries near his house […]

The Situation of Human Rights for Students and Youth in Burma

The situation of human rights for students and youth in Burma is grave. Violence, forced labor and forced recruitment into the armed forces are preventing the youth of Burma from reaching their potential. There is a lack of opportunities for education and meaningful work which has led a large number of Burma’s young people […]

NLD Statement No-16/09/11 Released on its 23rd Anniversary

During the unprecedented uprising in 1988, the monks, laity, students and other people of Burma, by sacrificing lives, blood and sweat, demanded human rights and democracy for the country and the people. It is now 23 years since the National League for Democracy (NLD) was formed […]

NLD Statement: No.15/08/11

ျပည္ေထာင္စုသမၼတ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ႏွင့္ အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ အေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဴး ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္တို႕သည္ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ (၁၉) ရက္ေန႕ ညေန (၄)နာရီတြင္ သမၼတအိမ္ေတာ္ရွိ […]