Only One Side of the Story of Reform in Burma

By Khin Ohmar

The statement by Burma’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Wunna Maung Lwin, on 13 September at the 24th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, on the country’s recent reforms or “progressive developments,” made for interesting reading. Indeed, it seems to suit many, not least the Burma government, to impose a simplistic narrative on events in the country over the last two years. Yet such a narrative is only one side of the story […]

Statement on Religious and Ethnic Violence that has Occurred in Myanmar

1. We, youth representatives of all religions, strongly condemn any insult or desecration for any reason of the national flag, which is of utmost importance to our nation.

2. We, youth representatives of all religions, including Myanmar Islam youth, unreservedly oppose the manipulative use of the Quran by those from overseas for the purpose of agitation of any kind causing outbreaks of violence.

3. We, youth representatives of all religions, including Myanmar Buddhist youth, unreservedly oppose the perpetration of violence and agitation of any kind causing outbreaks of violence and goes against the teaching of Buddha […]

Same Constitution, Same Problems

The Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar, Tomás Ojea Quintana, finished his 7th visit to Burma on Saturday and his report highlights the grave human rights concerns in Burma today. The escalation of conflict in Kachin State, communal violence in Arakan State, the continuing detention and torture of political prisoners, land confiscation due to development projects, restrictions on freedom of association and assembly are among the poor human rights conditions stated in his report. The scale of such human rights violations, in spite of the reforms initiated by the government, emphasizes the necessity of the role of the Special Rapporteur.

Many of the human rights violations that Quintana reported have a direct obstacle in the path of correcting these abuses: the 2008 Constitution. The 2008 Constitution was written by the military without Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy or genuine representation from Burma’s ethnic areas. It was described by the 88 Generation Students Group as a “sham constitution” and through corruption, fraud and intimidation, the ruling junta outrageously claimed that 92% of the people who voted ratified the document […]

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar

The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar was established by the Commission on Human Rights in its resolution 1992/58 and extended most recently by the Human Rights Council in its resolution 19/21 […]

Open Letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at High-level UN Meeting on the Rule of Law

We are writing this letter to highlight the continued state sanctioned violence and civil war in our home, Kachinland. Despite the international euphoria surrounding purported reform in Burma, grave human rights violations are increasing to an alarming level while the international community selectively focuses their attention on investment. We, the KNO, therefore urge you and your office to address the following issues in your upcoming high-level UN meeting on the Rule of Law […]

Cynical Manipulation of Legal System Prefigures Continued Authoritarianism

Two cases in Burma’s courts that recently have attracted some public attention reveal aspects of a legal system being cynically manipulated, aspects that afford strong guarantees for the continuation of authoritarian practices and mentalities […]

ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေၾကညာစာတမ္း

[…] အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္၏ ျပန္လည္မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲဝင္ရန္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ရျခင္း၏ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မ်ားမွာ (၁) တရားဥပေဒစိုးမိုးေရး (၂) ျပည္တြင္းျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးရရွိေရး (၃) ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒကို ျပင္ဆင္ႏိုင္ေရးျဖစ္ေပသည္ […]