January – June 2014: Report on the Human Rights Situation on Burma

Introduction

The Network for Human Right Documentation-Burma (ND-Burma) is an organization that documents and reports human rights violations taking place throughout Burma. We are a watch-dog for human rights violations and are continually monitoring the human rights situation in Burma.

This report covers the first period of 2014 and focuses on 103 documented cases of human rights violations in Burma from January-June 2014. There are many serious human rights violations addressed and highlighted in this report, including: torture, extra-judicial killing, illegal arrests and detention, arbitrary taxation, property crimes, forced labor, human trafficking, forced displacement and rape.

Even though President U Thein Sein promised to release all political prisoners by the end of 2013, there are still many political prisoners in Burma, including new detainees in 2014. Many human right defenders and activists have been arrested under the Unlawful Association Act of 1908, Section 5 (e) and 5 (j) of the Emergency Provisions Act, and Section (18) of the Right to Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession Act. For example, U Win Cho and U Nay Myo Zin were arrested under Section (18) for protesting the confiscation of land in Kyauk Ta Dar Township, Yangon. Moreover, innocent Kachin IDPs were arrested under Section (17) of the Unlawful Association Act for suspected contact with ethnic armed groups. These actions reinforce the fact that the government in Burma is still willing to use oppressive and unjust laws against the Burmese people […]

Move to Proportional Representation a Power Grab by the Military-backed USDP

The debate over a potential change to Burma’s electoral system, from a First Past the Post System (FPP) to a Proportional Representation System (PR) is gathering momentum, with a new committee formed by the Parliamentary lower house speaker, Shwe Mann, to discuss whether this is appropriate for the country. While the general debate over suitability of differing electoral systems is complex and broad, if seen through the eyes of the context in Burma, there is one clear winner if this change is implemented before the 2015 general election: the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) which is unsurprisingly supportive of this change.

The argument for Burma to change to PR is certainly compelling. Theoretically, it will give smaller political parties, such as the NDF who proposed the motion, more chance of representation in the legislature, while the same goes for smaller ethnic political parties. Yet it is much more complex than this. For constituencies in ethnically concentrated areas, where there is a dominant ethnic political party, for example the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) in Arakan State, FPP is more advantageous for that dominant ethnic political party, as seen in the RNDP’s dominance of the Arakan State legislature. Focusing on winning seats in ethnically concentrated areas might be the only way that ethnic political parties guarantee representation under the first past the post system. Yet under PR, if the total population of a certain ethnic group is under the 1% threshold of votes needed to gain a seat that is typical of PR, then that party will not win any seats at all, even if the ethnic nationality it represents is dominant in certain constituencies.[…]

အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္အေနျဖင့္ PR စနစ္ကို ေထာက္ခံျခင္း မရွိေၾကာင္း ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာခ်က္

အခ်ိဳးက် ကုိယ္စားျပဳစနစ္(PR)ကို ျပည္နယ္မ်ားမပါ တုိင္းေဒသၾကီးမ်ားတြင္သာ က်င့္သုံးေရးဆုိင္ရာ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ကၽြႏု္ပ္တုိ႔ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမုိကေရစီအင္အားစု NDF ပါတီ အေနျဖင့္ ဇြန္လ ပထမပတ္ တြင္ အမ်ိဳးသား လႊတ္ေတာ္၌ အခ်ိဳးက်ကိုယ္စားျပဳစနစ္ PR က်င့္သုံးေရးကို ျပည္နယ္ မ်ားတြင္မပါဘဲ၊ တုိင္းေဒသၾကီးမ်ားတြင္သာ က်င့္သုံးရန္ အဆိုျပဳခဲ့ပါသည္။

၂။ NDF ပါတီအေနျဖင့္ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ကာလကပင္ ပီအာစနစ္ကုိ က်င့္သုံးရန္ ျပည္သူ႔ လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ တင္ျပခဲ့သည္ […]