Government Must Go Further with Prisoner Release

The release of at least 120 political prisoners in Burma today is a minimum first step, and the authorities must immediately and unconditionally release all remaining prisoners of conscience, Amnesty International said today […]

Update on the October 12 Prisoner Release

The U Thein Sein administration announced on the 11th of October that 6,359 prisoners would be released under a general amnesty. As of today, October 12, 2011, the first group of prisoners was released […]

Political Prisoner Release Too Small, Senior Leaders Still in Jail

Small number of prisoners released a reality check for those believing promises of reform.

Burma Campaign UK today expressed disappointment at how few political prisoners have so far been released under a new prisoner amnesty in Burma. Many senior political prisoners also remain in jail […]

Request Submitted in Open Letter by Myanmar National Human Rights Commission to President of Republic of Union of Myanmar

In a series of steps you have taken in fulfillment of the hopes of the people for good governance, clean government, flourishing of democratic practices, fundamental rights of citizens, rule of law, transparency and accountability, one perceptible step is the establishment of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission on […]

ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးသံုးသပ္ခ်က္ (၁/၂၀၁၁)

ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားအား ခၽြင္းခ်က္မရွိ လႊတ္ေပးေရးသည္ အလြန္အေရးၾကီးသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးလုပ္ငန္းစဥ္တစ္ခုျဖစ္ျပီး လြတ္ျငိမ္းခ်က္သာခြင့္ႏွင့္လည္း ဆက္စပ္ေနသည္။

ဦးသိန္းစိန္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေသာ ၾကံ့ဖြံ႕အစိုးရသည္ ယခင္နအဖစစ္အစိုးရကဲ့သို႕ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္မ်ားတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား မရွိပါဟု အၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ ျငင္းဆိုေနသည္ကို ေတြ႕ရသည္ […]

UN and ASEAN Must Ensure Regime’s New Promises are Followed by Real Actions

After months of extensive public mobilization to save the Irrawaddy River from development, President Thein Sein took yet another calculated step this week announcing the suspension of the Myitsone dam project amid controversy within the regime. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi welcomed the decision, as did community and environmental groups campaigning on the issue. However, Burma Rivers Network pressed for further steps, namely that the China Power Investment corporation issue an official declaration to confirm Thein Sein’s announcement, and immediately remove all personnel and equipment from the dam site. The network also called on the regime to cancel the 6 other dam projects planned on source rivers of the Irrawaddy.

At the UN General Assembly in New York this week, Burma’s Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin said that the regime would grant an amnesty to prisoners “at an appropriate time in the near future.” However, he failed to clearly state when this would be or whether this would include any of the nearly 2,000 political prisoners who remain imprisoned in Burma […]

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 […]

Burma Briefing No. 16: Political Prisoner Releases in Burma

As speculation mounts that the government in Burma is about to release some political prisoners, this briefing looks at the history of political prisoner releases in Burma […]

Criteria for AAPP’s Definition of a Political Prisoner

AAPP defines a political prisoner as anyone who is arrested because of his or her perceived or real active involvement or supporting role in political movements with peaceful or resistant means. AAPP maintains that the motivation behind the arrest of every individual in AAPP’s database is political, regardless of the laws they have been sentenced under […]

The Saffron Revolution: A Call to International Action

During the peaceful demonstrations in 2007 which marked Myanmar’s ‘Saffron Revolution’, thousands of monks participated in democratic rallies against the military rule across Myanmar. Despites a government crackdown on internet and mobile links to the outside world, images were shown worldwide of mass arrests and indiscriminate government-violence upon peaceful civilian protesters.

We, the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC) thus strongly condemns the widespread brutality, systemic use of torture, solitary confinement, enforced disappearance and cruel and degrading treatment undertake by this illegitimate regime […]