နိုဝင္ဘာ ၁ ၊ ၂၀၁၄ ေန႔စြဲျဖင့္ အစိုးရထုတ္ သတင္းစာမ်ားတြင္ ပါရိွသည့္ ‘နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (AAPP)ႏွင့္ နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္းမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ (FPPS) တုိ႔၏ တင္ျပမႈအေပၚ စိစစ္ခ်က္အရ အျခားျပစ္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္ခဲ့သူ ျပစ္ဒဏ္က်ခံဆဲ (၂၇)ဦး အမည္စာရင္း’ ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ အေပၚ သေဘာထားေႀကညာခ်က္

နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (AAPP) ႏွင့္ နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသားေဟာင္း မ်ားအဖြဲ႔(FPPS) တုိ႔သည္ စတင္တည္ေထာင္ခ်ိန္မွစ၍ နိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသား တစ္ဦးခ်င္းစီ၏ အမႈျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ား၊ အမႈတြဲဖိုင္မ်ား၊ စီရင္ခ်က္ မ်ားကို ရနိုင္သမွ် ေလ့လာစစ္ေဆး သံုးသပ္ျပီး၊ မိမိတို႔ ဖြင့္ဆုိထားသည့္နုိင္ငံေရး အက်ဥ္းသား အဓိပၸါယ္ ဖြင့္ဆိုခ်က္ႏွင့္အညီ နုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား စာရင္းကို ျပဳစု ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ […]

Despite End-of-Year Amnesty, Political Prisoner Issue Casts Shadow Over 2014

To casual Burma observers, President Thein Sein may appear to have fulfilled his promise to British Prime Minister David Cameron on 15 July 2013 that all political prisoners in Burma would be released by the end of 2013. After all, political prisoners were freed throughout 2013, culminating in two “final” releases on 11 December (41 released) and 31 December (16 released). The motive is not hard to discern: such high profile releases play into the current “good news” narrative on Burma. The international community, hungrily eyeing up Burma’s huge potential as an untapped frontier market of boundless investment opportunities, cheap labor and vast natural resources, tends to lap up such reports without examining the narrative more carefully.
Inevitably the narrative is not so simple. The most prominent criticism of the Burma government’s policy towards political prisoners in 2013 was that it was releasing some, while all the time arresting others, particularly land and community activists. This “revolving door” policy ensured that Burma’s jails were in no danger of being put out of business […]

President Thein Sein Fails to Keep His Promise to Release All Political Prisoners by Year-End

The international community should hold the Burmese government accountable for failing to fulfill its promise to release all political prisoners by December 31, 2013, said FIDH and its member organization the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN-Burma) today […]

Amnesty Does Not Free All Political Detainees

The Asian Human Rights Commission welcomes Order No. 51/2013 of 30 December 2013 by the president of Burma (Myanmar), issuing a general amnesty for all persons imprisoned or facing trial or investigation for certain categories of political offences. The categories include persons accused or convicted of offences under the colonial-era Unlawful Associations Act, for charges of treason, sedition or disturbing the public tranquillity under the Penal Code (sections 122, 124A and 505[b]), the 2011 Peaceful Assembly and Procession Law, and the 1950 Emergency Provisions Act […]

Khin Mi Mi Khaing, Myint Myint Aye and Thant Zin Htet Released After Hunger Strike

Burma Campaign UK today welcomes the release of Khin Mi Mi Khaing, Myint Myint Aye and Thant Zin Htet, who have been on hunger strike since December 13th. The three were released after Pegu Divisional court accepted their appeal against the charges against them.

Khin Mi Mi Khaing and Myint Myint Aye are leaders of two independent women’s networks in Burma, and Thant Zin Htet is a student activist. In June, they visited Pae Ma Khan village in Bago Division to show their support to farmers who ploughed land that had been confiscated from them […]

Free All Human Rights Defenders and Stop Ongoing Arbitrary Arrests

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, an FIDH-OMCT joint programme, welcomes the latest release of human rights defenders who were among the political prisoners detained in Burma/Myanmar, and now urges the Government to immediately and unconditionally release all those who remain detained and to stop ongoing arbitrary arrests and imprisonment […]

Political Prisoners Continue to Be Used as a PR Tool by Thein Sein

Today Burma Campaign UK welcomed the news that 69 political prisoners have been released but expressed concerns that, once again, the release of political prisoners is cynically timed with the visits of high profile international delegations.

Activists Aung Soe and Naw Ohn Hla were among the released prisoners, and their cases were highlighted in our No Political Prisoner Left Behind campaign in March and August 2013 […]

Myanmar: UN Expert Welcomes Latest Release of Prisoners of Conscience, but Raises Alarm over Ongoing Arrests

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, Tomás Ojea Quintana, has welcomed the latest presidential amnesty on 23 July resulting in the release of 73 prisoners of conscience, while raising concerns over ongoing arrests of activists […]

73 Prisoners Freed in Latest Presidential Release

Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) welcomes the 23rd July release of seventy-three prisoners from prisons across Burma. AAPP (B) will seek to provide support to each of the political prisoners who have been released. Wherever possible, individuals will receive assistance to cover the cost of medical checkups upon leaving prison, as well as for any subsequent medical care they may require. AAPP (B) will continue to provide extensive support and assistance to newly released political prisoners wherever we are able to […]

Political Prisoner of the Month Brang Shawng Released

Burma Campaign UK today welcomed the release of 73 political prisoners, including Brang Shawng, who was highlighted as a political prisoner of the month by Burma Campaign UK as part of the No Political Prisoner Left Behind campaign. Among the other political prisoners released are reported to include 29 Shan prisoners and 26 Kachin prisoners […]