Testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations “Accountability and Transformation: Tier Rankings in the Fight against Human Trafficking”

Thank you, Chairman Smith, and other distinguished members of the Subcommittee for inviting me to testify at this important hearing on the U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report and the tier-ranking process […]

United States: Assign Tier-3 Rankings to Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh in Annual Trafficking Report

(WASHINGTON, DC—April 22, 2015) The State Department should assign Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Bangladesh a tier-three ranking in its forthcoming Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report in order to encourage more robust and effective action to combat human trafficking, Fortify Rights said today […]

Mong Ton Villagers Protest Against Salween Dam at Consultation Meeting

About 150 local villagers protested against the planned Upper Salween (Mong Ton) dam during a consultation organized by Australia’s Snowy Mountain Engineering Corporation (SMEC) in Mong Ton, southern Shan State, Burma on April 6, 2015 […]

Women Activists Facing Harassment by Proponents of Dawei Special Economic Zone

The Tavoyan Women’s Union (TWU) is gravely concerned at increasing harassment and intimidation of women who have been raising concerns about the impacts of the Dawei Special Economic Zone (DSEZ) and related projects […]

Justice: Koh Tao Murder Case – Fundraising Campaign Launched To Support Defendants Fair Trial

The Migrant Worker Rights Network (MWRN), representing migrant workers in Thailand, has today launched an appeal to support an adequate defense, by appointed lawyers, of two Myanmar migrant workers accused of gang rape and murder of two British tourists on Koh Tao Island, Thailand in September 2014. The fundraising campaign comes amidst widespread concerns regarding the possible arrest of scapegoats in this case who didn’t commit acts of murder or rape. […]

Statement On the International Human Rights Day

1. On the auspicious occasion of the International Human Rights Day, the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) joins the people of Myanmar and the international community in commemorating this historic day […]

ျမန္မာနုိင္ငံ ေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္မ်ား ကြန္ဂရက္၏ အ႒မအႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ညီလာခံ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္

၁။ ျမန္မာနုိင္ငံေက်ာင္းသား လူငယ္မ်ား ကြန္ဂရက္၏ အ႒မႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ညီလာခံကို ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္၊ ႏို၀င္ဘာလ(၂၀) ရက္မွ (၂၂)ရက္ထိ (၃)ရက္တာ ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္ တေနရာတြင္ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္ ခ့ဲသည္။ ညီလာခံသို႔ ကြန္ဂရက္အဖဲြ႕၀င္ အဖြဲ႕အစည္း(၁၁)ဖြဲ႕မွ ညီလာခံ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ မ်ားႏွင့္ ေလ့လာသူ အပါအ၀င္ စုစုေပါင္း(၃၉)ဦး တက္ေရာက္ ခ့ဲၾကပါသည္။ […]

New National Land Use Policy Must Reflect the Concerns of those Affected

The Burma Government released its draft land use policy document and opened it up for consultations with the public. Despite this positive sign, the time for consultations is inadequate with no proper mechanism or space created for the meaningful participation of affected communities in order for their concerns to be reflected in the draft. The draft document itself has been heavily criticized for serving to further empower investors over small scale farmers.

Since the beginning of the reform process in 2011, land grabbing, a practice that the previous military regime engaged in regularly, has hit new heights as a flurry of investors seek opportunities in previously untapped markets and the Burma Government liberalizes the economy. A prime example of this is the Dawei Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Project, a joint Thailand–Burma Government initiative that is seeking private investment to create one of the largest industrial zones in Asia. A report released by Dawei Development Association on 21 October 2014 highlights how 20-36 villages will be negatively affected. Concerns iterated by the local communities show that they have “lost farmlands and natural resources that are vital to their livelihoods, without prior information.” Furthermore “there was no meaningful consultation, and a deeply flawed compensation process.”

Land grabbing is often done with protection from the military, or by the military itself, for factories, infrastructure projects, mono-crop plantations, or military bases, and as with the Dawei SEZ case, usually without adequate or indeed, any compensation. It is a nationwide problem, both in ethnic areas, as documented by the Human Rights Foundation of Monland and Karen Human Rights Group, while in central Burma and delta areas, land grabbing is common place. Given that around 70% of the population of Burma is engaged in agriculture, and it is agricultural lands that are most often confiscated, it is one of the most pressing issues for Burma today […]

Finnwatch Researcher Andy Hall Trial in Thailand: Charge is Dismissed due to Unlawful Interrogation Process

The Prakanong Court in Bangkok dismissed defamation charge brought against Andy Hall by Natural Fruit Company Ltd, a pineapple export factory. Natural Fruit has launched multiple criminal and civil prosecution against the researcher and activist since February 2013 as a result of his contribution to a Finnwatch report published in 2013. The report revealed serious human rights violations at Natural Fruit’s pineapple juice production facilities […]

Equal Only in Name: the Human Rights of Stateless Rohingya in Thailand

Two important new reports on discrimination against stateless Rohingya in Malaysia and Thailand were launched today by the Equal Rights Trust in partnership with the Institute for Human Rights and Peace Studies Mahidol University, Bangkok (IHRP) […]