Outcome Statement of senior officials Workshop on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and Related Resolutions

The Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) and UN Women, Myanmar organized a Workshop on UN Security Council Resolution, 1325 ( UNSCR 1325) on Women, Peace and Security, and related Resolutions in Nay Pyi Taw on 27-28 April 2015. The meeting brought together 41 participants – parliamentarians, senior government officials from ministries addressing women, peace and security issues, commissioners and staff of MNHRC and academics […]

UN Myanmar Rights Expert: Backtracking on Democratic Space Gains Momentum in Election Year

YANGON / GENEVA (19 January 2015) – “Valuable gains made in the area of freedom of expression and assembly risk being lost,” United Nations Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee said at the end of her ten-day official visit* to the country. “Indeed, there are signs that since my last visit, restrictions and harassment on civil society and the media may have worsened.” […]

High-level Intimidation of Chin Women Activists Exposes Systemic Impunity for Military Rape

On June 10, 2014, a soldier from Burma Army Light Infantry Battalion no. 269, stationed at Razua, in Matupi Township, Chin State, attempted to rape a local Chin woman, aged 54, badly injuring her. When the police handed over the perpetrator, Myo Thura Kyaw, to the Razua military base, many local people worried that proper justice would not be served. They began questioning his whereabouts and demanding transparent prosecution under a civilian court. In a similar case last year, a soldier from the same base who had attempted to rape a 14-year-old girl was let off without punishment […]

အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအေပၚ စစ္တပ္က လိင္မႈဆုိင္ရာ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈ ဆန္႔က်င္လႈပ္ရွားမႈအား အာဏာပုိင္မ်ား ႏွိပ္ကြက္ျခင္းကုိ ရပ္တန္႔ေပးေရး ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ႔၏ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ဇြန္လ (၁၀) ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အသက္ (၅၄)ႏွစ္ရွိ ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးတစ္ဦးအား ခလရ ၂၆၉ မွ တပ္မေတာ္သား တစ္ဦးက မုဒိမ္းက်င့္ ရန္ႀကိဳးစားရာ မိမိကုိယ္ကုိ ခုခံရာ တြင္ ျပင္းထန္စြာ ဒဏ္ရာရရွိခဲ့ၿပီး ေရဇြာ ျပည္သူ႔ေဆးရုံတြင္ ေဆးရုံတင္ကုသမႈ ခံလွ်က္ရွိပါသည္။ တပ္မေတာ္သားအား ဖမ္းဆီးထားၿပီး ျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ခါတုိင္း ကဲ့သုိ႔ပင္ အေရးယူမႈ တကယ္မလုပ္ပဲ လြတ္သြားမည္ကုိ ေဒသခံမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ စုိးရိမ္ေနၾကပါသည္။ ထုိ႔ေၾကာင့္ ေရဇြာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ႔သည္ ဇြန္လ (၁၅၊ ၁၆)ရက္ေန႔ တြင္ ေရဇြာ ရဲစခန္းသုိ႔ စခန္းျပခြင့္ ေတာင္းယူခဲ့ၾကရာ အပယ္ခ် ခံခဲ့ရပါသည္ […]

Women From Burma Delegation Speaks In British Parliament

A delegation of women from Burma will speak at a meeting in the British Parliament today. They will be speaking about the ongoing use of rape and sexual violence by the Burmese Army, as well as the situation in Kachin State highlighting the ongoing military offensive and humanitarian assistance for IDPs, Karen and Shan State, refugees return, the peace process and new laws restricting freedom of autonomy to choose the religion and women’s rights […]

Burma: Drop Draft Religion Law

(New York) – Burma’s parliament should scrap a proposed religion law that would encourage further repression and violence against Muslims and other religious minorities, Human Rights Watch said today. The draft law on religious conversions, published in the state-run media on May 27, 2014, would impose unlawful restrictions on Burmese citizens wishing to change their religion […]

Statement of Women’s Groups and CSOs on Preparation of Draft Interfaith Marriage Law

We believe that current faith–based political activities, including the arguments against interfaith marriage currently taking place in the country, are not in accordance with the objectives of the peaceful coexistence of all faiths and the prevention of extreme violence and conflict, but are instead events and ideas designed to distract the public before the 2015 election […]

WLB Welcomes UN Recognition of Burmese Government Failure to Address Ongoing Sexual Violence

The Women’s League of Burma welcomes a new report by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon that calls for Burma’s government to investigate crimes of sexual violence, and highlights the need for constitutional reform to bring the military in Burma under civilian oversight […]

Conflict-related Sexual Violence: Report of the Secretary-General

The present report, which covers the period from January to December 2013, is submitted pursuant to paragraph 22 of Security Council resolution 2106 (2013) , in which the Council requested me to submit annual reports on the implementation of resolutions 1820 (2008) , 1888 (2009) , 1960 (2010) and 2106 (2013) with regard to conflict […]

Coercion, Cruelty and Collateral Damage

An assessment of grave violations of children’s rights in conflict zones of southern Burma  

This report is titled “Coercion, Cruelty and Collateral Damage: An assessment of grave violations of children’s rights in conflict zones of southern Burma”, and it is released by the Woman and Child Rights Project (WCRP), which was founded in 2000 by members of the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM) to monitor and protect the rights of women and children in southern Burma. The 24-page report reveals that grave violations of children’s rights such as recruitment of child soldiers, killing and maiming, rape and sexual abuse, and forced labor continue to be committed by the Burmese military, despite the creation, by the United Nation Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1612 on Children and Armed Conflict passed in 2005 […]