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။ […]

Urgent APRRN Statement On Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand Allowing Migrants Rescued at Sea Temporary Protection

APRRN welcomes the decision of the governments of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand to provide temporary protection to refugees and migrants rescued at sea as a step in the right direction […]

Joint Statement By UNHCR, OHCHR, IOM And SRSG For Migration and Development: Search and Rescue At Sea, Disembarkation, and Protection of The Human Rights of Refugees and Migrants Now Imperative To Save Lives in The Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea

We, the undersigned*, strongly urge the leaders of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, to protect migrants and refugees stranded on vessels in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, to facilitate safe disembarkation, and to give priority to saving lives, protecting rights, and respecting human dignity […]

Press Release: US Government Needs to Step Up to Avert Growing Humanitarian Disaster of Rohingya Refugees

(Washington DC, May 18, 2015) – Today, US Campaign for Burma calls on the U.S. government to take leadership in providing immediate humanitarian assistance to the Rohingya refugees as well as putting effective pressure on the Burmese government to end its systemic ethnic cleansing program of the Rohingya […]

Human Rights at the Bottom of the Andaman Sea

Earlier this week, two boats containing 600 refugees from Burma – mainly Muslim Rohingya – were turned away from the shores of Malaysia, having fled oppression under the Burma Government. They had been at sea for over two months and faced severe dehydration, starvation, and sickness. According to the International Office for Migration, there may be up to 8,000 still stranded at sea, many of whom will perish unless the international community provides urgent and substantive support. The scale of the exodus from Burma is alarming; according to the UN, this year alone more than 25,000 refugees have left Burma and Bangladesh for the shores of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Many have been identified as Rohingya, Burma’s most persecuted religious minority population. For decades, the Rohingya have been systematically denied citizenship by their oppressive, military-backed government and subjected to repressive and discriminatory legislation, widespread and systematic human rights abuses, and violence that Human Rights Watch has classified as ethnic cleansing. Since 2012, hundreds have died and more than 140,000 have been displaced from their homes and villages. At the very least, the Burma authorities have been criminally negligent as regards the Rohingya; in many cases they were reportedly complicit in the violence. The Burma Government has shown no willingness to even investigate the violence, let alone prosecute those responsible.

Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia: Coordinate Sea Rescues, Protect Asylum Seekers and Trafficking Survivors

(BANGKOK)—Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia should immediately coordinate search and rescue operations for Rohingya asylum seekers and possible survivors of trafficking from Myanmar and Bangladesh who are stranded at sea, Fortify Rights said today […]

Killing, Beheading and Disappearance of Villagers Instill Fear of Return Among Kokang Refugees

According to recent interviews by SHRF, Kokang refugees sheltering in China remain fearful of return, due to killing, beheading and disappearance of villagers caught returning home […]

Voices of Refugees – Situation of Burma’s Refugees Along the Thailand-Burma Border

The joint briefing paper by Burma Link and Burma Partnership, Voices of Refugees – Situation of Burma’s Refugees Along the Thailand-Burma Border, which was published online on 27 April 2015, highlights how the voices of refugees continue to be neglected in Burma’s reform process.

The briefing paper was initially launched and presented by Soe Aung at the most recently convened Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Civil Society Conference/ASEAN Peoples’ Forum 2015 in Malaysia, which took place between 22-24 April 2015 […]

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 […]

Key Messages to World Leaders, International Governments and the UN Concerns and Requests Related to Humanitarian Situation in Kachin and Northern Shan States, Myanmar

The 25thASEAN Summit is commencing from 11 to 13 November 2014, hosted by Myanmar in its capital, Naypyi Taw. Most prominent world leaders are gathering and discussing important matters affecting the ASEAN countries and, inevitably, the interconnected global arena. On this occasion, Joint Strategy Team for Kachin Humanitarian Response would like to urge the world leaders, international governments and the UN to pay attention to the following concerns and take immediate actions to fulfill the requests. We firmly believe that the world leaders, international governments and the UN will strongly support the protection of dignity and rights of the internally displaced persons […]