HURFOM Releases the Report of “In Pursuit of Justice: Reflections on the Past and Hopes for the Future of Burma”

In order for Burma to successfully transition towards genuine democracy and national reconciliation, the Burmese government must address, and act upon, the specific needs expressed by victims of past human rights abuse, says the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM) in a report released this morning. The 90-page report, titled In Pursuit of Justice: Reflections on the past and hopes for the future of Burma, details the history of human rights violations perpetrated in Burma’s ethnic minority areas, and analyzes how to repair the relationship between the government and citizens to rebuild trust and move through a peaceful transition towards a united future Burma […]

Burma’s Ethnic Challenge: From Aspirations to Solutions

Important steps have been made in national reconciliation during the past two years. But promises and ceremonies will never be enough. The long-standing aspirations of Burma’s peoples for peace and justice must find solutions during the present time of national transition […]

ရွစ္ေလးလုံး ဒီမိုုကေရစီ အေရးေတာ္ပံုု ေငြရတု ေၾကညာစာတမ္း

ရွစ္ေလးလံုုး ဒီမိုုကေရစီ အေရးေတာ္ပံုု ေငြရတုုအခမ္းအနားသိုု႔ တက္ေရာက္လာေသာ ျပည္တြင္း၊ ျပည္ပ၊ နယ္စပ္ အသီသီး ရွိ ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္အင္အားစုုမ်ား၊ ဒီမိုုကေရစီပါတီမ်ား၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားပါတီမ်ားနွင္႔ လက္နက္ကိုင္ အင္အားစုမ်ား၊ လူထုအေျချပဳအင္အားစုမ်ားနွင္႔ မ်ိဳးဆက္သစ္လူငယ္အင္အားစုမ်ား၊ လယ္သမား၊ အလုပ္သမား မ်ားအပါအဝင္ အလႊာစံုျပည္သူမ်ားသည္ ၂၀၁၃ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၆ ရက္၊ ၇ ရက္ေန႔မ်ားတြင္ စုစည္းညီညြတ္စြာ ေတြ႕ဆံု၍ ေဆြးေႏြး၍ […]

Nobel Peace Laureates: A True Democratic Future in Burma Will Require Reconciliation

Burma has taken important steps in the past two years to move from decades of repression toward a democratic future. Many, though not all, political prisoners have been conditionally released. Our fellow Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest, and the National League for Democracy now has seats in parliament after contesting last year’s by-elections. The government has also taken some positive steps toward economic reform […]

Position Statement of KNU on Current Situation in the Country

The KNU reaffirms deeply its appreciation of effort by current Burma (Myanmar) government and its processes for securing ceasefire and peace with the armed ethnic organizations.

The violent suppression by Myanmar authorities of the ongoing people’s movement relating to Letpadaung Taung Copper Mining Project should never have happened […]

Burma’s Inequalities Must be Addressed Through National Reconciliation and Broad Reforms

The past week has brought shocking news of sectarian tensions erupting in violence in Arakan State, while 9 June marked one year since armed conflict broke out in Kachin State, ending a 17-year long ceasefire agreement between the Burma Army and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). These problems highlight the urgent need for national reconciliation across political, ethnic and religious lines, and comprehensive reforms that address deep inequalities in Burma.

On 8 June, the Kachin Women’s Association – Thailand (KWAT) released a new report at a press conference with other Kachin organizations to highlight the ongoing armed conflict and human rights abuses. KWAT’s report documents how in the last year, the people of Kachin State have faced arbitrary arrest, torture, forced labor, rape and sexual violence at the hands of the Burma Army who continue to commit these crimes with impunity. Among the most horrendous accounts are those of women being gang-raped, tortured and used as sexual slaves by Burma Army soldiers […]

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 […]

Union Day Highlights the Fundamental Need to Address the Political Aspirations of the Ethnic Nationalities

On 12 February 2012, Burma celebrated the 65th Union Day, a holiday that commemorates the signing of the Panglong agreement by Aung San, the leader of Burma’s independence movement, and representatives of the Chin, Shan and Kachin people. The agreement, which was never implemented, provided for the creation of a Federal Union, called for power sharing between the majority Burman and non-Burman ethnic nationalities, and granted the non-Burman ethnic nationalities autonomy in the administration of their territories.

On this historic occasion it is particularly important to ensure that political reforms in Burma live up to the aspirations of the non-Burman ethnic nationalities, including their desire to participate equally in public life. The Nationalities Brotherhood Forum, a five-party ethnic alliance which includes Chin, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan representatives, noted in their Union Day statement that “[w]e are saddened by the continuing lack of equality and national democratic rights for the ethnic nationalities, despite the fact that Independence was collectively achieved for the Union of Burma through the spirit of Panglong.” […]

ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးသံုးသပ္ခ်က္ (၂/၂၀၁၁) – အမ်ဳိးသား ျပန္လည္ရင္ၾကားေစ့ေရးႏွင့္ ေတြ႕ဆံုးေဆြးေႏြးေရးျဖစ္စဥ္

၁၉၈၈ ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေရးေတာ္ပံုၾကီးအျပီး ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႕ စစ္အစိုးရတို႕ ထိပ္တိုက္ေတြ႕ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တာ ၂၃ႏွစ္တာကာလ အတြင္းမွာ ၁၆ၾကိမ္ေျမာက္ ရွိလာခဲ့ပါျပီ။ ေတြ႕ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့တဲ့ မွတ္တမ္းေတြကိုၾကည့္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ၁၉၉၄ ခုႏွစ္မွာ (၂) ၾကိမ္၊ ၂၀၀၂ ခုႏွစ္မွာ (၁) ၾကိမ္၊ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္မွာ (၃) ၾကိမ္၊ ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္မွာ (၃) ၾကိမ္၊ […]

Released Political Prisoners Reaffirm Their Commitment to Working for Human Rights and National Reconciliation in Burma

On 12 October, the regime released 6,359 prisoners from prisons across the country. However, the amnesty included only 220 political prisoners, leaving as many as 1,800 behind bars. The international community overwhelmingly responded by urging the regime to release the remaining political prisoners, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma, Tomás Ojea Quintana.

Burmese language media and blogs carried many moving interviews with political prisoners who were released, in which they spoke about detention conditions, the disappointing number of political prisoners released and how they would continue to work to improve the situation of human rights and democracy in Burma […]