Burma’s 2010 Elections: A Comprehensive Report

A report released by the Burma Fund UN Office for the opening of Burma’s first Parliament, documents the widespread political repression and human rights abuses marring the electoral process in the country’s first elections in more than 20 years. It shows that none of the fundamental requirements for free and fair elections exist in Burma, and instead of heralding in positive change, the elections brought about a deepening of Burma’s human rights crisis […]

Burma’s 2010 Elections: Devastating Fraud

Forum for Democracy in Burma has collected and documented election related violations, and explains in this report with 12 chapters to expose that the 2010 election were the election in which people of Burma were intimidated, threatened and […]

The Burma Fund UN Office Releases Comprehensive Election Report Documenting Widespread Political Repression and Human Rights Abuses

A report released by the Burma Fund UN Office for the opening of Burma’s first Parliament, documents the widespread political repression and human rights abuses marring the electoral process in the country’s first elections in more than 20 years. It shows that none of the fundamental requirements for free and fair elections exist in Burma, and instead of heralding in positive change, the elections brought about a deepening of Burma’s human rights crisis [..]

၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၏ မသမာမႈမ်ားကို ေဖာ္ထုတ္စုစည္းတင္ျပထားသည့္ အစီရင္ခံစာဆိုင္ရာ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၏ မသမာမႈမ်ားကို ေဖာ္ထုတ္ဖြင့္ခ် စုစည္းတင္ျပထားေသာ အစီရင္ခံစာတေစာင္ကို “မတရားဆံုး မတရားမႈမ်ား” အမည္ျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဒီမိုကရက္တစ္အင္အားစုမ်ားမွ ယေန႕ေန႕စြဲျဖင့္ ထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ပါသည္။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဒီမိုကရက္တစ္အင္အားစုအေနျဖင့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအၾကိဳကာလအတြင္း နအဖစစ္အစိုးရႏွင့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္တို႕၏ ညစ္ပတ္မႈမ်ားႏွင့္ မေလ်ာ္ဩဇာသံုးမႈမ်ားကိုလည္း ၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္၊ ႏိုဝင္ဘာ (၁) ရက္ေန႕က “ေကာက္က်စ္မႈအဖံုဖံု ညစ္နည္းစံု” အမည္ျဖင့္ အစီရင္ခံစာတေစာင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ျပီးျဖစ္ပါသည္ […]

Fraudulent Elections Undermine Citizen’s Electoral Rights

“There was intimidation and forced voting. People in the villages also said they were given presents and money. The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) told voters to vote for them at the polling station. The uneducated people were convinced by the USDP. We also realized that the USDP had many advance votes. The USDP conducted a census of elderly people and counted them all as advance votes. I do not think significant changes will occur after the election. This is just to change the name [of the government].”

– A voter from Irrawaddy Division

Burma’s elections took place in a highly undemocratic and repressive environment governed by a countrywide entrenched climate of fear. This environment, coupled with a lack of voter secrecy, ensured that the regime and its allied parties were able to easily carry out electoral fraud on a widespread and systematic basis. Through the manipulation of advance votes, tampering of voter lists, vote buying, and illegal campaigning, the USDP was able to comfortably secure an overwhelming victory, despite the complete lack of genuine public support.

Human Rights and Burma Election 2010

လူ႕အခြင့္အရး ကာကြယ္ျမွင့္တင္သူမ်ားကြန္ယက္ (HRDP) မွထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ေသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေလ့လာသံုးသပ္ေရး အစီရင္ခံစာသည္ ၂၀၁၀ ျမန္မာ့ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ကာလသံုးပိုင္းခြဲကာ စစ္ေဆးသံုးသပ္ထားသည္ […]

Elections Marred By Regime’s Campaign Restrictions, Harassment and Lack of Voter Education

“In my region, many people were not interested in the elections, and didn’t know anything about the elections. There was no electoral education and people who knew about elections were afraid of getting into trouble. I don’t think the elections will bring any betterment to people. I see the elections are designed for the military regime.”

– A voter in Sagaing Division

During the elections, the regime took extensive measures to limit election participation at all levels; from restricting political party participation to blocking free flow of information on the elections, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) ensured that they would be able to dominate and control the process from beginning to end. Ethnic parties and ethnic voters were particularly marginalized and suppressed as the Election Commission rejected leading ethnic parties and candidates, security forces hassled ethnic parties, and ethnic voters received little to no electoral education. By limiting such participation, the regime effectively stifled opposition from political parties and the electorate on the day of the polls.[…]

PFOB Chair Decries Absurd Election Complaint Fees and Calls on the Military and its Proxy Party to Protect Aung San Suu Kyi

It is absurdly difficult to make a complaint about the recent sham elections in Burma orchestrated by the military and their party USDP. To make a single complaint costs about 5 times your annual income. And if the complaint is determined to be unfounded, you can be fined about 15 times your annual salary. “This is absurd” said PFOB Chair the Honourable Larry Bagnell M.P. Yukon […]

Week 35: 2010 Election Watch (2-8 November)

Developments

Widespread evidence of electoral fraud, irregularities, threats, harassment, and lack of independent monitoring characterized Election Day and the days leading up to it:

• In the days before the election, local SPDC officials, polling station officials, and Union Solidarity and Development (USDP) members throughout the country solicited advance and proxy votes, in the overwhelming majority of cases specifically for the USDP […]

Week 34: 2010 Election Watch (26 October – 1 November)

Developments

• NLD members distributed election boycott leaflets in Rangoon’s Insein and Mingaladon Townships. Riot police in Rangoon’s North Okkalapa Township surrounded “no-vote” campaigners as they attempted to distribute election boycott leaflets.
• Around 1,200 people from over 150 villages protested the elections in Ye and Thanbyuzayat Townships in Mon State and Kyainnseikyi Township in Karen State […]