ပံုႏွိပ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ထုတ္ေ၀ျခင္း လုပ္ငန္း ဥပေဒၾကမ္းအား BNI ကန္႔ကြက္

ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္က ဇူလိုင္လ ၄ ရက္ေန႔က အတည္ျပဳလိုက္သည့္ ပံုႏွိပ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ထုတ္ေ၀ျခင္း လုပ္ငန္း ဥပေဒၾကမ္းကို တိုင္းရင္းသားမီဒီယာ အမ်ားစု ပါ၀င္ဖြဲ႕စည္း ထားသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ျမန္မာ့သတင္း (Burma News International- BNI) က ကန္႔ကြက္လိုက္ပါသည္။ “ဒီဥပေဒဟာ အစိုးရရဲ႕၀န္ၾကီးဌာန ျဖစ္တဲ့ ျပန္ၾကားေရး ၀န္ၾကီးဌာနကို သတင္းဌာနေတြရဲ႕ မွတ္ပံုုတင္ခြင့္ကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ေပးလိုက္တာ ျဖစ္တယ္” ဟု ဘီအဲန္အိုင္ အဖြဲ႔ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရး အရာရွိ နန္းေဖာ့ေဂ က ေျပာသည္ […]

Myanmar: Analysis of Government Press Law

The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) and International Media Support (IMS) today released Comments on the draft Printing and Publishing Enterprises Law (draft Law) released by the Ministry of Information of Myanmar in early March 2013. In August 2012, the Ministry tasked the Interim Press Council with preparing a draft Press Law, and the release of the draft Law by the Ministry came as a surprise to many observers. As the Comments make clear, the draft Law fails in important ways to conform to international standards regarding media freedom […]

Myanmar: Ministry’s Draft Press Bill Would Restore Prior Censorship and Full Government Control

A draft press bill put before parliament by the Minister of Information and Communications should be withdrawn or rejected when it has its first reading in June as it would be a major step backwards for freedom of expression and freedom of the media, restoring prior censorship and full governmental control over the press […]

Retrograde Bill Threatens Tentative Progress

Although eight privately-owned dailies are to be launched on 1 April in a development that is without precedent in the past 40 years, Reporters Without Borders is very concerned about a proposed new law on printing and publishing that was submitted to parliament on 4 March […]

Burma Still Requires the UN Human Rights Council’s Attention

This week 22 organizations from Burma released a statement calling on the 22nd Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council to maintain its resolution on the situation of human rights in Burma under item 4 as “Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention” and to renew the full mandate of the Special Rapporteur Tomás Ojea Quintana. Serious human rights challenges that require the Council’s attention remain as the events of this week illustrate.

Border Security Forces in Arakan State allegedly raped 13 young Rohingya women. This highlights the serious remaining issues of the rampant culture of impunity for security forces and the Burma Army and the decades-long discrimination against the Rohingya organized and perpetuated by the government.

In Kachin State, despite ceasefire talks, fighting continued this week making more and more victims on the civilian side […]

Draft Media Law a Step Backward for Burma

Draft legislation designed to govern the media in Burma threatens to reverse fragile press freedom gains recently achieved under President Thein Sein’s democratic reform program, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today […]

Myanmar: Press Bill Falls Far Short of International Law and Would Leave Press Open to Abuse

Despite promises of reform, a new press bill to be presented in parliament retains a vagueness that will leave the print media open to abuse from the government and other powerful actors.

The draft Press Law Bill (2013) says that the media should become “a fourth pillar” of democracy “watching and guiding the other three”. The media will not however become a fourth pillar under this draft because it undermines their role and overly restricts their work […]