Activists Hold Little Hope for 2010 Elections in Burma

Burma is now preparing for elections at the state, regional and national level. But the country’s much-criticized election laws prompted the main opposition party to opt out, leaving many activists disheartened and disgruntled.

This is how Burmese, pro-democracy advocates living in India reacted to new election rules in Burma. The rules essentially bar Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and other opposition leaders from running […]

A New Year but the Same Injustice: Concerns for Dissidents in the Aftermath of Bombings

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) (AAPP) expresses it deepest condolences for those killed and injured in the bombings in Rangoon and in Kachin State during Thingyan (Burmese New Year). AAPP is concerned that the current bombings will lead to an increase in the harassment and arrest of political dissidents, as has occurred in the past. Reportedly, a few people have already been detained after the recent explosions.

Imprisoned Burmese Blogger Nay Phone Latt to Receive Top PEN Honor

PEN American Center today named Nay Phone Latt, one of Burma’s leading bloggers, as the recipient of its 2010 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. Nay Phone Latt, who is also a poet, was arrested on January 29, 2008, following the monks’ protests in Rangoon and elsewhere in the country, and is serving a 12-year sentence for distributing news and views via his blog.[…]

Monthly Chronology – March 2010

There are a total of 2,186 political prisoners in Burma, an overall increase in comparison to last month’s figure of 2,185. In March, 3 activists were arrested and 3 political prisoners were released […]

၆၅ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးေန႔ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

၆၅ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ ေတာက္လွန္ေရး ေန႔တြင္ စည္းလုံးညီညြတ္ေသာ တိုင္းရင္းသားလူမ်ိဳးစုမ်ား မဟာမိတ္အဖဲြ႔မွ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္တခု ထုတ္ျပန္လုိက္ပါသည္။ထုိထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ တြင္ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတဝွမ္းလုံးရွိ တုိင္းရင္းသားတို႔၏ စည္းလုံးညီညြတ္ေသာ စြမ္းပကားျဖင့္ ဖက္ဆစ္ဂ်ပန္တို႔အားေျခမႈန္း ေတာ္လွန္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ၾကသကဲ့သို႔ ႏိုင္ငံ၏လြတ္လပ္ေရးကိုရယူ ႏိုင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္ျဖစ္ရာ တမိ်ဳးသားလုံးစည္းလုံးညီညြတ္မႈသည္ အေရးၾကီးလွေၾကာင္း စသည္တို႔အပါအဝင္ နအဖအစိုးရအား ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္၊ ခြန္ထြန္းဦး၊ မင္းကုိႏိုင္ အပါအဝင္ မတားရားသျဖင့္ေထာင္ခ်ခံေနရေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား အာလုံးျပန္လႊတ္ေပးရန္ အစရွိသည့္ ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္မ်ားကုိ လည္းထည္႔သြင္းထုတ္ျပန္ထားပါသည္။ Download the statement in Burmese.

AAPP 10th Anniversary and Report Launch

To mark the 10th anniversary of its founding, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) launched a new report, “The Role of Political Prisoners in the National Reconciliation Process”. The report calls on the international community to press the military junta to unconditionally release all political prisoners, review the 2008 Constitution, and begin a tripartite dialogue.[…]

The Role of Political Prisoners in the National Reconciliation Process

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

For decades, the people of Burma have been striving for peace, democracy and the full realization of their human rights. Recognizing this goal, political parties like the National League for Democracy (NLD) and ethnic nationality groups have attempted to engage in a process of national reconciliation, but the ruling military regime (known as the State Peace and Development Council, SPDC) has resisted this at every turn. At its heart, ‘national reconciliation’ is resolution of the conflicts brought about by the struggle for democracy, human rights, equality, and self-determination that have been ongoing since independence. Burma’s 2,100 plus political prisoners represent that struggle, yet the SPDC continues to deny their existence.[…]

PM Calls Election Terms in Burma “Restrictive and Unfair”

The Prime Minister has called the terms of the Burmese election laws “restrictive and unfair” and called for an urgent meeting at the UN in New York to discuss these developments.

The laws have been published ahead of the election in the country later this year […]

ဟံသာ၀တီ ဦး၀င္းတင္ရဲ့ ေထာင္တြင္းအေတြ႔အၾကံဳ စာအုပ္ထြက္ရွိ

သတင္းစာဆရာ ဟံသာ၀တီ ဦး၀င္းတင္ရဲ့ စာမ်က္ႏွာ ၃၁၈ မ်က္ႏွာပါရွိၿပီး ရက္ေပါင္း ၇၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ ေထာင္တြင္း အေတြ႔အၾကံဳမ်ားကို ေရးသားတင္ျပထားတဲ့ ‘ဘာလဲဟဲ့ လူ႔ငရဲ’ စာအုပ္ကို ဆရာႀကီးရဲ့ အသက္ (၈၀) ျပည့္ ေမြးေန႔ (၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္ မတ္လ ၁၂ ရက္ေန႔) မွာ စတင္ထုတ္ေ၀ ျဖန္႔ခ်ိမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီစာအုပ္ကို ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ ျမန္မာ့အသံ က စီစဥ္ထုတ္ေ၀ၿပီး ႏုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ) က တာ၀န္ယူ ျဖန္႔ခ်ိမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီစာအုပ္မွာ အခန္းငယ္ ၁၀ ခန္းနဲ႔ ေဆာင္းပါးေပါင္း ၄၂ ပုဒ္ ပါ၀င္ပါတယ္။ ဆရာက မေၾကာက္တရားကို အေျခခံၿပီး ေထာင္တြင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္ခံရမႈမ်ားကို […]

International Women Day and Burma’s Women Political Prisoners

On International Women’s Day, AAPP has released a brief on the women political prisoners. The brief shows that there are women from all across Burma and from various sectors of society, who are imprisoned for their political beliefs. There are women in prison as young as 21 and as old as 68. The brief also […]