Briefing Paper: The legacy of mass torture and the challenge for reform in Myanmar

Torture has a long history in Myanmar and has been widely employed by the military regimes in power after 1962 […]

Torture, extrajudicial killing, and use of civilians as human shields by Burma Army during new offensive against SSPP/SSA near Upper Yeywa dam site in Kyaukme

During May 2016, the Burma Army has committed grave human rights violations, which meet the definition of war crimes, during a new offensive against the Shan State Progress Party/Shan State Army (SSPP/SSA) in Kyaukme township, northern Shan State, close to the Upper Yeywa dam site on the Namtu/Myitnge river […]

Political Prisoners Need Not Be Forgotten

On 25 May, 2016, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) and the Former Political Prisoners Society (FPPS) released a joint-report entitled “‘After release I had to restart my life from the beginning’: The experiences of ex-political prisoners in Burma and challenges to reintegration.” Based on information provided by 1,621 former political prisoners, the report exposes the mistreatment and abuse – including the use of torture – that has proliferated Burma’s prison system […]

FBR Report: July Update – Kachin and northern Shan State

The Burma Army continues its attacks in Kachin State and northern Shan State, Burma. Clashes continue unabated, as the Burma Army attacks Mali Yang Village in northern Shan State, and abuses such as killings, torture, forced labor, and theft remain a tool of the Burma Army to oppress ethnic groups in Burma. Please see below the list of figures for specific accounts of Burma Army abuses […]

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.” […]

Amnesty International Annual Report – Myanmar Chapter

Despite ongoing political, legal and economic reforms, progress on human rights stalled, with some backward steps in key areas. The situation of the Rohingya deteriorated, with ongoing discrimination in law and practice exacerbated by a dire humanitarian situation. Anti-Muslim violence persisted, with the authorities failing to hold suspected perpetrators to account. Reports of abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law in areas of armed conflict persisted. Freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly remained severely restricted, with scores of human rights defenders, journalists and political activists arrested and imprisoned. Impunity persisted for past crimes […]

Myanmar: Ensure Independent and Impartial Investigation into Death of Journalist

The Myanmar authorities must ensure a comprehensive, independent, impartial and effective investigation into the death of journalist Aung Kyaw Naing, aka Par Gyi, who was reportedly killed while in the custody of the Myanmar Army in Mon State, Eastern Myanmar, earlier this month. Failure to adequately ? and transparently ? investigate such serious allegations and hold perpetrators to account would further entrench impunity in the country, and have a chilling effect on other journalists […]

ကိုေအာင္ေက်ာ္ႏိုင္ (ခ) ကိုပါႀကီးအား အစေဖ်ာက္ သုတ္သင္ျခင္း၊ ဥပေဒမဲ့ သတ္ျဖတ္ျခင္းအား ကန္႔ကြက္႐ႈံ႕ခ်ျခင္း

၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္၊ စက္တင္ဘာလ (၃၀) ရက္ေန႔က က်ိဳက္မေရာၿမိဳ႕ စက္ေလွဆိပ္ တြင္ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္က အလြတ္တန္း သတင္းေထာက္ ကိုေအာင္ေက်ာ္ႏိုင္ (ခ) ကိုပါႀကီးအား ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့ပါသည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္ ျမန္မာ့ တပ္မေတာ္ ေျချမန္ တပ္ရင္း ၂၀၈တြင္ ခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ဖမ္းဆီး၍ စစ္ေဆး ေမးျမန္းသည္ဟု သိရပါသည္။ ၄င္းေနာက္ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၃ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ စာနယ္ဇင္းေကာင္စီ (ယာယီ) မွေန၍ ေၾကညာခ်က္တစ္ေစာင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ […]

AAPP (B) Submission to the UN General Assembly

AAPP has submitted a report to the 65th UN General Assembly reminding the Burmese Government of its commitment to signing on to the UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). The report references a statement by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Thant Kyaw, who earlier this year announced that Burma would indeed be signing the covenant in September of 2014. However, no such action was taken last month. The reports highlights a number of instances of torture that have occurred thus far in 2014, and concludes by urging the international community to “apply what pressure they can as part of the global effort to afford every human being the right to be free of torture.” […]

ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္၊ ပလက္၀ျမိဳ႕နယ္မွ ခ်င္းတိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖါက္ခံရျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ပူးတြဲသေဘာထား ထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၁။ ခ်င္းျပည္နယ္၊ ပလက္ဝျမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ကုန္ျပင္ေက်းရြာေန ခ်င္းတိုင္းရင္းသား မ်ားျဖစ္ၾက သည့္ ဦးေက်ာ္ေအာင္၊ ဦးေအးလွ၊ ဦးေမာင္စိန္၊ ဦးေက်ာ္ျမင့္ဦး၊ ဦးေအာင္ေက်ာ္လွႏွင့္ ဦးေအာင္ဆိုတို႔ ၆ ဦးအား အေနာက္ပိုင္းတိုင္း စစ္ဌာနခ်ဳပ္ လက္ေအာက္ခံ၊ အမွတ္ ၃၄၄ ေျခလ်င္တပ္ရင္းမွ ဗုိလ္မွဴးတင္ထြဋ္ဦးပါ ၁၃ ဦးအဖြဲ႔မွ ၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၈ မွ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၁ ရက္ေန႔အထိ ခ်င္းအမ်ိဳးသားတပ္ဦး (CNF) ႏွင့္ အဆက္ အသြယ္ ျပဳလုပ္သည္ဟူေသာ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ျဖင့္ မတရားခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ ရိုက္နက္ခဲ့သည့္ အျပင္ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၄ ရက္ ေန႔တြင္ ဗိုလ္မွဴးတင္ထြဋ္ဦးမွ ၄င္းတို႔အား ၾကိဳတင္ ေရးထား သည့္ ဝန္ခံဂတိျပဳစာရြက္ေပၚတြင္ အတင္းအၾကပ္ လက္မွတ္ေရးထုိး ေစခိုင္းျခင္း မ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း သိရိွရသည္။ […]