Thein Sein Again Uses Political Prisoners As PR Tools

Following reports that 23 political prisoners are being released today, just hours before Thein Sein leaves for a trip to the USA where he is due to meet president Obama in the White House, Burma Campaign UK accused President Thein Sein of blatantly using political prisoner releases as PR tools […]

AAPP (B) Urges Government of Burma to Release All Remaining Political Prisoners

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) expresses displeasure with the manner political prisoners have been released on 17 May, resulting in the release of 23 prisoners, of which 19 are confirmed to be political prisoners. While AAPP (B) welcomes the freeing of any political prisoner […]

Government Uses Political Prisoners as Bargaining Chips Yet Again

On 23 April, Burma’s government announced a presidential amnesty for 93 prisoners. Media originally reported that this included 59 political prisoners, however, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) has confirmed the names of 63 released. Among those released were 40 Shan soldiers, reportedly from the Shan State National Army, and former majority shareholder of the Myanmar Times, Sonny Swe.

In yet another illustration of the government using political prisoners as bargaining chips, the release happened the day after the European Union decided to lift all sanctions on Burma, except an arms embargo. Previous political prisoner releases also coincided with decisions made by the international community or visits by key international figures, such as US President Barack Obama’s visit last November.

Ko Bo Kyi from AAPP welcomed the amnesty, although he said the government failed to carry out the decision properly: “The release of the political prisoners should be publicly announced. The government should treat them with dignity,” he said. “They are somewhat like bargaining chips, used by the government to gain some achievements” from the international community. AAPP estimates that there are still more than 200 political prisoners […]

January Political Prisoners of the Month Have Been Released

Burma Campaign UK today welcomed the release of Aung Hmine San, Than Htike, Min Naing Lwin and Thein Aung Myint who were arrested for protesting without permission. However, Burma Campaign UK urged the military-backed government in Burma to repeal the current protest law which doesn’t give genuine rights and freedom to protest […]

Burma: Release of Detainees Welcome, But Questions Remain

The Asian Human Rights Commission welcomes the release yesterday of a few dozen political detainees in the latest amnesty announced by the government of Burma, as well as the other initiatives contained in an official news release of 18 November 2002, in particular […]

AAPP Cautiously Welcomes Release, Urges Thein Sein to Officially Recognize Existence of Political Prisoners

AAPP cautiously welcomes the presidential order that resulted in the release of 51 political prisoners, as of 5 p.m. on 19 November. The releases were strategically timed to coincide with US President Obama’s historic visit to Burma […]

Arbitrary Arrests in Burma: A Tool to Repress Critical Voices

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) is highly concerned that the government of Burma continues to use arbitrary arrest as a tool to hold members of the democracy and human rights movement behind bars often without formal charges […]

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမိသားစုမ်ား အက်ဳိးေဆာင္ကြန္ယက္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁၇.၉.၂၀၁၂ ရက္ေန႔က ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတ၏လြတ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာခြင့္ျဖင့္ အက်ဥ္းသား စုစုေပါင္း (၅၁၄) ဦးလႊတ္ေပးခဲ့ရာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား (၈၈) ဦးသာပါ၀င္ခဲ့ဟု သတင္းမ်ားအရ သိရွိရသည္။ ယခုဆိုလွ်င္ အင္းစိန္အက်ဥ္းေထာင္၊ ေတာင္ငူအက်ဥ္းေထာင္၊ သာယာ၀တီအက်ဥ္းေထာင္ […]

“None Should be Left Behind” – UN Expert Welcomes Latest Release of Prisoners of Conscience in Myanmar

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, Tomás Ojea Quintana, welcomed the latest presidential amnesty resulting in the release of a number of prisoners of conscience, and renewed his call for the immediate and systematic liberation of all prisoners of conscience without conditions […]

Burma Prisoner Release Public Relations, Not Reform

Burma Campaign UK today accused Burma’s President Thein Sein of playing games with the lives of political prisoners, using them as pawns in his efforts to persuade the international community to lift sanctions […]