110 High Profile Women Stand with the Women of Burma to End Rape and Sexual Violence

On International Women’s Day, 110 high profile women, including Dame Judi Dench, Annie Lennox, Jo Brand, Gillian Anderson, Imelda Staunton, Julie Walters and Zoë Wanamaker, are standing with the women of Burma to end rape and sexual violence […]

Can Burma’s Human Rights Commission Fight Sexual Violence in Conflict Areas?

RANGOON — The Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) has said they are ready to address cases of sexual violence perpetrated by the Burma Army, but rights groups remain skeptical of the commission’s ability to achieve justice […]

Protection of People Must be Priority in Burma’s Protracted Peace Process

In a new briefing paper titled, “Protection of People Must be Priority in Burma’s Protracted Peace Process” released to mark Union Day, Burma Partnership highlights how the peace process of the Thein Sein Government has been unsuccessful, ultimately leading to many powerful ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) refusing to sign the nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA). It also resulted in a call by civil society organizations to postpone the Union Peace Conference […]

Myanmar: One Year On, No Justice for Kawng Kha Rape

(Yangon, January 19, 2016) – Myanmar authorities should allow an independent investigation into the rape and killing of two Kachin women from Kawng Kha Village, Northern Shan State, Civil Rights Defenders said today […]

Burma Bows its Head in Shame on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

Last week, the Women’s League of Burma marked the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women by calling upon the incoming National League for Democracy Government to take a serious stance on the protection of women from sexual violence. According to their statement, “Women and girls in the Union of Burma are facing with different kinds of violence daily. Especially in ethnic areas, continuous impunity remains for the military personal who continued to commit sexual violence against women and girls.”

The International Day, observed each year on 25 November, was initiated by the United Nations General Assembly in 1999 to recognize the widespread physical and sexual violence against women around the world. Considering that globally, one out of three women have experienced physical or sexual violence, it is crucial for the international community to address this pandemic and the gender inequality that fuels it. In Burma, sexual violence is widespread and perpetrators – particularly those within the Burma Army – share complete impunity from prosecution […]

The International Day, observed each year on 25 November, was initiated by the United Nations General Assembly in 1999 to recognize the widespread physical and sexual violence against women around the world. Considering that globally, one out of three women have experienced physical or sexual violence, it is crucial for the international community to address this pandemic and the gender inequality that fuels it. In Burma, sexual violence is widespread and perpetrators – particularly those within the Burma Army – share complete impunity from prosecution.

Villagers Remain Fearful after Burma Army Rape-Murder in Ho Pong, Despite Punishment of Alleged Culprit

On June 6, 2015, a 28-year-old Shan woman was found raped, murdered and robbed in Ho Pong Township, southern Shan State, with evidence pointing to Burma Army soldiers stationed at the nearby Light Infantry Battalion 249 outpost. After initial denial, local Burmese military officers arrested one of their soldiers for the crime, gave him a public beating, and announced he would be given the death sentence. The Eastern Commander himself, Major General Aye Win, came from Taunggyi to apologize to the victim’s husband, and donated money and food to him […]

On World Refugee Day Burma Government and International Community Must Commit to Respecting Voices and Rights of Burma’s Refugees

(20 June, 2015) On this 2015 World Refugee Day, we stand in solidarity with the over 110,000 refugees who fled Burma to seek protection in the nine camps along the Thailand-Burma border, embodying the years of conflict and the struggle for democracy […] ၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႕တြင္ က်ေရာက္သည့္ ကမၻာ့ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားေန႔တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ ထြက္ေျပးလာၿပီး ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္တေလွ်ာက္ရွိ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္း (၉) ခု၌ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္မႈခံယူေနေသာ ဒုကၡသည္ ၁၁၀,၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ႏွင့္ အတူ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ ေသြးစည္းညီၫြတ္စြာ ရပ္တည္ေနပါသည္။ ယင္းဒုကၡသည္မ်ားမွာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ၾကာေညာင္းေနၿပီျဖစ္သည့္ စစ္ပြဲ ႏွင့္ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးတိုက္ပြဲကို ထင္ဟပ္ေနပါသည္။ ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔သည္ ကုလသမဂၢဒုကၡသည္မ်ားဆိုင္ရာမဟာမင္းႀကီး (UNHCR)၊ ျမန္မာအစိုးရ၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအလႉရွင္မ်ားႏွင့္ သက္ဆိုင္သူအားလံုးတို႕ကို ၁၉၅၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဒုကၡသည္အဆင့္အတန္းဆိုင္ရာ ကြန္ဗင္း ရွင္းသေဘာတူညီခ်က္ႏွင့္ ၁၉၆၇ ခုႏွစ္ ဒုကၡသည္အဆင့္အတန္းဆိုင္ရာ လုပ္ထံုးလုပ္နည္းတို႔အား ေလးစားလိုက္နာရန္ႏွင့္ ဒုကၡသည္အားလံုး၏ အခြင့္အေရးမ်ားကို ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင့္ေရွာက္အားေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါသည္။ […]

The Burma Government Must Stop Condoning Sexual Violence in Conflict Areas

On 5 June 2015, Burma Campaign UK released a briefing paper that illustrated the Burma Government’s lack of action towards eliminating sexual violence since it signed the Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict (the Declaration) last year. As a signatory to the declaration, Burma agreed to prioritize prevention of sexual violence and to hold all perpetrators accountable to the full extent of the international law, amongst other related commitments.

Unfortunately, not only has Burma ignored its commitments to the Declaration, it is also actively violating it, as cases of rape and sexual assault continue to emerge from conflict areas. According to Burma Campaign UK, “Given the widespread nature of sexual violence by the Burmese Army, the refusal to act, and now the violation of commitments made in the Declaration, it can only be concluded that the use of rape and sexual violence by the Burmese Army is condoned at the highest level of the government and the military.” […]

UN Secretary-General: Burma: ‘High Level of Impunity’ for Sexual Violence by ‘State Actors’

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has stated that there is: ‘a high level of impunity for conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated by State actors’ in a recently released report to the UN Security Council. The UN Secretary-General urged the government of Burma “…to ensure that security personnel accused of such crimes are prosecuted.” The report also stated that there is a ‘a lack of transparency in military courts.’ […]

Ethnic Women Urge Canadian Pressure to End Military Abuses in Burma

OTTAWA, CANADA, March 11, 2015 – Two ethnic women from Burma testified at the Canadian Parliament yesterday, calling for Canadian pressure on the Government of Burma to end systematic human rights abuses, particularly sexual violence, by the Burmese military […]