Tuesday, October 14, 2014

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BURMA/MYANMAR: Men brutally tortured in army base and imprisoned illegally

Urgent Appeal Case: AHRC-UAC-137-2014

13 October 2014
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BURMA/MYANMAR: Men brutally tortured in army base and imprisoned illegally

ISSUES: Torture; impunity; arbitrary arrest and detention; rule of law
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Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that after soldiers in Kachin State, northern Burma detained two men over alleged involvement in an anti-government armed group, they were tortured and interrogated illegally. Furthermore, although the men, named Lahpai Gan and Baran Yaun, were turned over to police custody they were then sent back to the military for the interrogation and torture. After that police opened two criminal cases against the men on the basis of the information obtained illegally through torture and arbitrary detention, and without any other evidence upon which to base the cases. Finally, the courts, although aware of these facts, sentenced the two to a total of seven years in prison.

CASE NARRATIVE:

On 9 June 2012 patrolling army troops and paramilitary personnel arrested Lahpai Gan and Baran Yaun on a general suspicion near Talawgyi Village, along with three cattle traders, while they were having lunch and taking a break from driving cattle. There had recently been a battle in the area with members of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). The troops took the men back to the village and assaulted them and detained them at the Buddhist monastery compound. After around three days, they took them by boat at night to the Talawgyi Police Station, and from there, to Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State.

On June 14 Captain Soe Paing of military intelligence took charge of the men, and at the army’s Northern Command Headquarters had them assaulted to the point of drawing blood, tortured and threatened to admit to being KIA soldiers. The methods of torture included techniques commonly reported in Myanmar, in addition to common assault: being forced to kneel on gravel for extended periods, forced simulated or actual homosexual intercourse, burning of genitals with candles, and burning the skin with the blade of a hot knife. They also include particular methods developed apparently in cases concerning Kachin people accused of involvement in the KIA, such as a stress position where the detainee is forced to stand imitating Christ crucified on the cross (since Kachin are predominantly Christian).

While the three traders were released, on the basis of the illegal detention and interrogation, on 26 June 2012 Captain Soe Paing handed the men to the police, who took them to the Kachin State Police Reserve Force premises where they interrogated them further, after which Inspector Ye Lwin lodged a case in court against the two and four other men—two of whom were also detained in Talawgyi and tortured by military intelligence, and two who were not in custody—for being members of an unlawful association.

Then, in the six months that this case was being heard, another police officer, Inspector Thein Win, opened a second case against the two men over a mine blast that had occurred outside the Myitkyina district office, causing damage to property but no casualties. Although his investigation had found five other men as being responsible for the crime, since he had failed to detain any of them he prosecuted these two accused in their stead.

In court, a police witness for the prosecution, Inspector Yan Aye, acknowledged under cross examination that the police had no eyewitnesses to the bombing, and had no evidence to link the two accused men to the crime but had based the case exclusively on the information supposedly obtained during illegal detention and interrogation in the army HQ. Furthermore, the defendants showed to the court the scars of injuries suffered while being tortured. Nevertheless, the court accepted the evidence obtained through use of torture in illegal detention, in violation of the Evidence Act and Criminal Procedure Code, and while releasing the two other detained accused of the charges, convicted Lahpai Gan and Baran Yaun.

The two men have throughout maintained their innocence and have appealed to successive courts to have the convictions overturned but the case has not been reheard in any court. Their lawyer is now taking the case to the final possible step in the judicial process of a special appeal to the Supreme Court; however, to have a special appeal accepted and heard is a difficult process and the prospects are not at all good.

Further details are provided in the sample letter below, as usual.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION:

In Burma, torture is widespread in police stations, where it most commonly takes the form of beatings and other blunt methods intended to cause pain and obtain a confession. In normal criminal cases like murder, rape and robbery, police have to take immediate action and give a report to the higher authorities promptly, so they usually look for an easy target and use torture to get a confession or otherwise make the detainee do what they want.

In the previous urgent appeals the AHRC has express its concern over police and military intelligence torture, sometimes resulting in death, such as in the cases of Ko Nan Win and Ma Than Than Aye, Soe Lin, Zaw Gyi, U Nyunt Tun, U Than Tun, Aung Hlaing Win, Myo Myint Swe, and Nan Woh Phan. In most cases also the court ignores the evidence of torture, to convict the accused.

Torture is not a criminal offence in Burma and police and soldiers are rarely held to account for the abuses committed on detainees in their custody. They are structurally protected via laws that require special authorisations to be given by their own agencies, and others, before they can be charged with crimes. A member of parliament in March 2013 made a statement on the need for a law against torture and for Burma to join the UN Convention against Torture, but up to the current time no action has been taken.

For many more cases and issues concerning human rights in Burma, visit the AHRC's country homepage: http://www.humanrights.asia/countries/burma.

SUGGESTED ACTION:
Please write a letter to the following government authorities to call for the immediate release of Lahpai Gan and Baran Yaun and for those responsible for their torture and arbitrary detention to be investigated and prosecuted.

Please note that for the purpose of the letter Burma is referred to by its official name, Myanmar.

Please also be informed that the AHRC is writing separate letters to the UN Special Rapporteurs on human rights in Myanmar, on torture, on extrajudicial killings; the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; and, the regional office in Bangkok, calling for their interventions into this matter.

SAMPLE LETTER:

Dear …………..,

MYANMAR: Police, courts, imprison two men on back of information obtained through torture in illegal army custody

Name of victim:
1. Laphai Gan, currently detained in Myitkyina Prison, Kachin State, Myanmar
2. Baran Yaun, currently detained in Myitkyina Prison

Names of persons involved:
1. Inspector Thein Win, station chief, Police Station No. 1, Myitkyina
2. Inspector Ye Lwin, Police Station No. 1, Myitkyina
3. Sub Inspector Kyaw Myo Naing (investigator)
4. Inspector Aung Mya Than (investigator)
5. Sub Inspector Myo Win Naing (investigator)
6. Sub Inspector Win Shwe (investigator)
7. Inspector Yan Aye
8. Captain Soe Paing, Military Affairs Security platoon, Northern Command HQ, Myitkyina, and personnel
9. Personnel of Infantry Battalion (IB) 37 and People’s Militia

Date of incident: 9 June 2012 to present
Place of incident: Myitkyina, Kachin State, Myanmar

Case details (against victims):
1. Criminal Case No. 1213/2012, Myitkyina Township Court, under section 17(1) of the 1908 Unlawful Associations Act, sentenced to two years in prison on 15 November 2013, Township Judge Myint Htoo presiding; Criminal Appeal No. 126/2013, Myitkyina District Court; Criminal Revision No. 27/2014, Kachin State High Court; Criminal Revision No. 275(b)/2014, Supreme Court, all applications for appeal and revision denied
2. Criminal Case No. 200/2012, Myitkyina District Court, under section 3 of the Explosive Substances Act, sentenced to five years in prison, Deputy District Judge Ne Lin presiding

I am deeply disturbed to learn that after soldiers detained two men over alleged involvement in an anti-government armed group, they were tortured and interrogated illegally. Furthermore, although they were turned over to police custody they were then sent back to the military for the interrogation and torture. After that police opened two criminal cases against the men on the basis of the information obtained illegally through torture and arbitrary detention, and without any other evidence upon which to base the cases. Finally, the courts, although aware of these facts, sentenced the two to a total of seven years in prison.

According to the information I have received, around 7.45pm on 3 December 2011, a mine exploded in front of the Myitkyina district office at the corner of Tatgon Sanbya Road and Duwa Road, Tatgon Ward in Myitkyina, causing damage to property but no casualties. An investigation headed by Inspector Thein Win found that a unit of five Kachin Independence Army (KIA) personnel allegedly had planted the mine.

Neither Lahpai Gan nor Baran Yaun was included among the five accused. However, on 9 June 2012 patrolling troops from IB 37 and paramilitary personnel arrested them on a general suspicion near Talawgyi Village, along with three cattle traders, while they were having lunch and taking a break from driving cattle. The troops took the men back to the village and assaulted them and detained them at the Buddhist monastery compound. After around three days, they took them by boat at night to the Talawgyi Police Station, and from there, to Myitkyina.

On June 14 Captain Soe Paing of military intelligence took charge of the men, and at the army’s Northern Command Headquarters had them assaulted to the point of drawing blood, tortured and threatened to admit to being KIA soldiers. The methods of torture included techniques commonly reported in Myanmar, in addition to common assault: being forced to kneel on gravel for extended periods, forced simulated or actual homosexual intercourse, burning of genitals with candles, and burning the skin with the blade of a hot knife. They also include particular methods developed apparently in cases concerning Kachin people accused of involvement in the KIA, such as a stress position where the detainee is forced to stand imitating Christ crucified on the cross (since Kachin are predominantly Christian).

While the three traders were released, on the basis of the illegal detention and interrogation, on 26 June 2012 Captain Soe Paing handed the men to the police, who took them to the Kachin State Police Reserve Force premises where they interrogated them further, after which Inspector Ye Lwin lodged a case in court against the two and four other men—two of whom were also detained in Talawgyi and tortured by military intelligence, and two who were not in custody—for being members of an unlawful association. Then, in the six months that this case was being heard, Inspector Thein Win having failed to detain and prosecute any of the five accused of the mine blast opened a second case against Lahpai Gan and Baran Yaun in their stead.

In court, a police witness for the prosecution, Inspector Yan Aye, acknowledged under cross examination that the police had no eyewitnesses to the bombing, and had no evidence to link the two accused men to the crime but had based the case exclusively on the information supposedly obtained during illegal detention and interrogation in the army HQ. Furthermore, the defendants showed to the court the scars of injuries suffered while being tortured. Nevertheless, the court accepted the evidence obtained through use of torture in illegal detention, in violation of the Evidence Act and Criminal Procedure Code, and while releasing the two other detained accused of the charges, convicted Lahpai Gan and Baran Yaun.

The two men have throughout maintained their innocence and have appealed to successive courts to have the convictions overturned but the case has not been reheard in any court. Their lawyer is now taking the case to the final possible step in the judicial process of a special appeal to the Supreme Court; however, to have a special appeal accepted and heard is a difficult process and the prospects are not at all good.

In view of the above, I call for intervention from the highest levels in Myanmar to secure the release of Lahpai Gan and Baran Yaun from prison, and for the criminal investigation and prosecution of the army and police personnel responsible for torturing them.

In closing, I remain very concerned that impunity is still widely enjoyed by state agents who have committed torture in Myanmar despite the government's recent political reforms. I have learned that groups inside the country have called on its parliamentarians to pass a law to criminalize torture, and that in March 2013 a Member of Parliament also raised the matter in the national legislature. I urge that steps be taken to introduce such a law at the earliest opportunity. Again, any such law needs to be in accordance with international standards. In this regard, a positive commitment to the prohibition of torture as a matter of principle would be for the government of Myanmar to at long last ratify both the UN Convention against Torture and its optional protocols, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

I look forward to your positive and effective response in this case.

Yours sincerely,

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PLEASE SEND YOUR LETTERS TO:

1. Lt-Gen. Ko Ko
Minister for Home Affairs
Ministry of Home Affairs
Office No. 10
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 412 079/ 549 393/ 549 663
Fax: +95 67 412 439

2. U Thein Sein
President of Myanmar
President Office
Office No.18
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

3. U Tun Tun Oo
Chief Justice
Office of the Supreme Court
Office No. 24
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: + 95 67 404 080/ 071/ 078/ 067 or + 95 1 372 145
Fax: + 95 67 404 059

4. Dr. Tun Shin
Attorney General
Office of the Attorney General
Office No. 25
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 404 088/ 090/ 092/ 094/ 097
Fax: +95 67 404 146/ 106

5. U Kyaw Kyaw Htun
Director General
Myanmar Police Force
Ministry of Home Affairs
Office No. 10
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 412 079/ 549 393/ 549 663
Fax: +951 549 663 / 549 208

6. Thura U Aung Ko
Chairman
Pyithu Hluttaw Judicial and Legislative Committee
Pythu Hluttaw Office
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

7. U Aung Nyein
Chairman
Pyithu Hluttaw Judicial and Legislative Committee
Committee for Public Complaints and Appeals
Office of the Amyotha Hluttaw
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

8. U Win Mra
Chairman
Myanmar National Human Rights Commission
27 Pyay Road
Hlaing Township
Yangon
MYANMAR
Tel: +95-1-659 668
Fax: +95-1-659 668

9. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
Chairwoman
Pyithu Hluttaw Rule of Law and Tranquility Committee
Office of the Pyithu Hluttaw
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR


Thank you.

Urgent Appeals Programme
Asian Human Rights Commission (ua@ahrc.asia)

Sunday, October 05, 2014

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ကေလးစစ္သား မထားဖို႔ ျမန္မာကို လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အဖြဲ႔ေတြ တုိက္တြန္း(VOA Burmese)

အင္ၾကင္းႏိုင္ 
03.10.2014 05:31

Photo:VOA 
 ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ကေလး စစ္သားေတြ ရွိေနဆဲျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ရဲ႕ CSPA လို႔ ေခၚတဲ့ ကေလးစစ္သား ဟန္႔တားေရး ဥပေဒနဲ႔ ျမန္မာ အေပၚ ဆက္လက္ အေရးယူသြားဖို႔ သမၼတ အိုဘားမားက အစိုးရရဲ႕ ေၾကညာခ်က္ ကို ႏိုင္ငံတကာလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အဖဲြ႔ေတြက ေထာက္ခံႀကိဳဆို လိုက္ပါတယ္။ ဒါအျပင္ ကေလး အခြင့္အေရး ဆိုင္ရာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ပဋိညာဥ္ စာခ်ဳပ္မွာ သေဘာတူ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုး ထားတဲ့ ျမန္မာအစိုးရအေနနဲ႕ တိုင္းျပည္တြင္းမွာ ကေလးစစ္သားပေပ်ာက္ေရး လက္ေတြ႔ အေကာင္ အထည္ေဖာ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ဖို႔လည္း တိုက္တြန္းလိုက္ပါတယ္။ အေၾကာင္းစံုကို မအင္ၾကင္းႏိုင္ကေျပာျပမွာပါ။
 ကမာၻမွာ ကေလးစစ္သား ပေပ်ာက္ေရးကိစၥဟာ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုရဲ႕ ခိုင္မာတဲ့ မူ၀ါဒျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္က ကေလးစစ္သားေတြကို ဆက္ၿပီး အသံုးျပဳေနတဲ့အေပၚ အေမရိကန္ အစိုးရက ဆက္လက္ အေရးယူတာလို႔ ျမင္တဲ့့ အေၾကာင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ႀကီးရဲ႕ အာရွေရးရာတာ၀န္ခံ Brad Adams က ဗီြအိုေအကိုေျပာပါတယ္။ "သမၼတ အိုဘားမားဟာ မွန္ကန္တဲ့ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ ခ်ခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ျမင္ပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာ စစ္တပ္က အျပည့္အ၀ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မွဳ မရွိခဲ့ပါဘူး။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ကေလးစစ္သားေတြကိုျပန္လႊတ္ေပးၿပီး ကေလးစစ္သား ပေပ်ာက္ေရး အေျခအေနေတြ တိုးတက္ေနၿပီလို႔ ကုလသမဂၢ ညီလာခံမွာ ျမန္မာအစိုးရ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္က ေျပာသြားတာေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ လက္ေတြ႕မွာ ကေလးစစ္သား လံုး၀မရွိေစရ ဆိုတဲ့မူ၀ါဒကို အခိုင္အမာခ်မွတ္ၿပီး အစိုးရေရာ၊ စစ္တပ္ကပါ လိုက္နာေဆာင္ရြက္တာမ်ဳိး က်ေနာ္တို႔ မေတြ႔ရေသးပါဘူး။ ကေလးစစ္သား အသံုးျပဳေနတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ နယူးေယာက္မွာ ျပဳလုပ္တဲ့ မေန႔က သတင္းစာ ရွင္းလင္းပဲြမွာ အေမရိကန္ ဒုလက္ေထာက္ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး Michael Kozat က ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္နဲ႔ တိုင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကိုင္တပ္ေတြမွာ ကေလးစစ္သား စုေဆာင္းေနဆဲျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ေျပာသြားပါတယ္။ 

ဒါနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ အာရွ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ရဲ႕ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတာ၀န္ခံ ဦးမင္းလြင္ဦးက အခုလို သူ႔အျမင္ကိုေျပာပါတယ္။ " ဆက္လက္စုေဆာင္းေနတဲ့ဆိုတဲ့ ကိစၥရပ္အေပၚမွာ ႏုိင္ငံတကာက ဘာေၾကာင့္ သံုးသပ္တာလည္းဆိုလို႔ရွိရင္ ဒီလိုတပ္မေတာ္ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ တပ္သားစုေဆာင္းတဲ့ အခါမွာ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ျဖစ္တဲ့ေနရာေဒသေတြမွာ မိဘမဲ့ ကေလးေတြကို သူတို႔ေခၚယူ ထိန္းသိမ္းတယ္။ တပ္မေတာ္ ထဲမွာပဲ ေလ့က်င့္ သင္တန္းေပးတယ္။ ဒီကေလးေတြကိုပဲ စစ္မႈထမ္း အျဖစ္ ျပန္လည္အသံုးျပဳတယ္။ ဒါအစဥ္အဆက္သူတို႔ လုပ္လာတဲ့ဥစၥာပဲ။ ဒါေတြက အခု အခ်ိန္အထိ ဆက္လက္ ရွိေနေသးတယ္ဆိုတာကို က်ေနာ္တို႔သိရတယ္။" ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ သတင္းပတ္ထဲမွာ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္က ကေလးစစ္သား တစ္ရာေက်ာ္ေလာက္ လႊတ္ေပးလိုက္တာ အပါအ၀င္ အရင္ကလႊတ္ေပးထားတဲ့ အေရအတြက္ဆိုရင္ သံုးရာေက်ာ္ေလာက္ရွိသြားေပမယ့္ ဒီလူငယ္ေတြရဲ႕ ဘ၀ျပန္လည္ ပ်ဳိးေထာင္ေပးဖို႔ အစီအစဥ္မ်ဳိး အစိုးရဘက္မွာမရွိဘူးလို႔ ဦးမင္းလြင္ဦး ကေထာက္ျပပါတယ္။ "အဲ့ေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ တပ္မေတာ္ကေန ထြက္လာတဲ့ ကေလးေတြရဲ႕ ျပန္လည္ ထူေထာင္ေရးကို စစ္တပ္က တာဝန္ယူၿပီးေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္အစိုးရက တာဝန္ယူၿပီးေတာ့ လုပ္ေပးတယ္ ဆိုတာ အခုအခ်ိန္အထိ က်ေနာ္ မၾကားဖူးေသးဘူး။ အဲ့ေတာ့ အဲ့ဒီ့ကေလးေတြ ေရာက္လာတဲ့အခါမွာ UNICEF ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ စစ္တပ္ထဲက ထြက္လာတဲ့ကေလးေတြအတြက္ အတတ္ပညာသင္ေပးတာတို႔ ေနာက္ ၿပီးေတာ့ လူမႈအသိုင္းအဝိုင္းထဲမွာ ဝင္ဆန္႔လာေအာင္ စိတ္ကုထံုးေတြနဲ႔ကုသေပးတာတို႔ဆိုတာ UNICEF က လုပ္တာ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ အစိုးရ တာဝန္ယူမႈ တာဝန္ခံမႈ လံုးဝ မရွိဘူးဆိုတာကိုေတာ့ ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း က်ေနာ္တို႔သိတယ္။" ဒါအျပင္ အရင္ မဆလေခတ္၊ စစ္အစိုးရေခတ္ကတည္းက အခုခ်ိန္ထိ ကေလးစစ္သား စုေဆာင္း အသံုးျပဳလာတာေၾကာင့္ ကေလးစစ္သားဦးေရ ဘယ္ေလာက္ထိ ရွိေနလဲဆိုတာ တိတိက်က် ဘယ္သူမွမသိဘူး လို႔ ဦးမင္းလြင္ဦးကေျပာပါတယ္။

 ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာ ကေလးစစ္သား အသံုးျပဳေနတာအျပင္ အျခားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ဴိးေဖာက္မွဳေတြ ပါရွိေနေသးတာမို႔ ဒါေတြကိုပါ အေရးယူေဆာင္ရြက္သင့္ တယ္လို႔လည္း HRW အာရွေရးရာ တာဝန္ခံ Brad Adams က ဆိုပါတယ္။ "အေမရိကန္အစိုးရအေနနဲ႕ ဒီကေလး စစ္သားကိစၥတင္မကပဲ ျပည္တြင္းမွာ ဆက္ၿပီးျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မွဳပံုစံမ်ဳိးစံုအတြက္ပါ အေရးယူမယ္ဆိုရင္ ပိုၿပီးေကာင္းပါလိမ့္မယ္။" အေမရိကန္သမၼတ အေနနဲ႔ လႊတ္ေတာ္ကို ႏွစ္စဥ္တင္သြင္းရတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ကေလးစစ္သား အသံုးျပဳမႈ ဟန္႔တားေရး အစီရင္ခံစာမွာ ကမၻာတဝွမ္း ကေလးစစ္သား အသံုးျပဳတဲ့ ႏိုင္ငံ ၉ ႏိုင္ငံ စာရင္းထဲ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ထည့္သြင္းထား တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီႏိုင္ငံေတြအထဲ ႏိုင္ငံအေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကို အေရးယူ ဒဏ္ခတ္မႈစာရင္းကို ေလွ်ာ့ေပါ့ေပးတာေတြ ရိွေပမယ့္ ျမန္မာ၊ ဆူဒန္နဲ႔ ဆီးရီယားႏိုင္ငံ သံုးႏိုင္ငံကိုေတာ့ ဒဏ္ခတ္မႈ ေလွ်ာ့ေပါ့ေပးတဲ့စာရင္းထဲ ထည့္သြင္းမထားပါဘူး။

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

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ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးရဲ႕ ကုလညီလာခံ မိန္႔ခြန္း ျမန္မာေတြတုံ႔ျပန္ (VOA Burmese)

30.09.2014
by အင္ၾကင္းႏိုင္
Photo credit: AP/Seth Wenig
ကုလသမဂၢအေထြေထြညီလာခံမွာ ေျပာသြားတဲ့ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးမိန္႔ခြန္းမွာ အခ်က္အလက္အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားဟာ တိုင္းရင္းသားျပည္သူေတြ ရင္ဆိုင္ေနရတဲ့ လက္ေတြ႔အေျခအေနနဲ႔ကင္းကြာေနတယ္လို႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအဖဲြ႔အစည္း၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားပါတီနဲ႔ ျမန္မာ့မီဒီယာသမားအခ်ဳိ႕က ကန္႔ကြက္ ေျပာဆိုလိုက္ပါတယ္။ အေသးစိတ္ကို မအင္ၾကင္းႏိုင္က တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

(၆၉) ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ကုလအေထြေထြညီလာခံမွာ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ဦ၀ဏၰေမာင္လြင္က ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးကို ပထမ၊ ဒုတိယ၊ တတိယလိႈင္းေတြနဲ႔ ျမန္မာအစိုးရက အေကာင္အထည္ေဖၚေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့တယ္ဆိုၿပီးတင္ျပသြားတာပါ။ ၂၀၀၈ ဖဲြ႔စည္းပံု အေျခခံဥပေဒျပင္ဆင္ေရးအတြက္ ဆိုရင္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္မွာ ေကာ္မတီတရပ္ဖဲြ႔စည္းၿပီး အေကာင္အထည္ေဖၚေဆာင္ရြက္ေနတယ္လို႔ေျပာသြားပါတယ္။ ဒီအေပၚမွာ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုကို ခတၱခဏေရာက္ရွိေနတဲ့ ဇိုမီဒီမိုကေရစီအဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္ ပါတီအေထြေထြအတြင္းေရးမွဳး ပူကင္ဂန္လ်န္က ဖဲြ႔စည္းပံုျပင္ဆင္ေရးကိစၥ လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္းမွာ ျဖစ္လာဖို႔ မျမင္ဘူးလို႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။

“ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးေျပာတဲ့အေပၚမွာေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔အျမင္နဲ႔ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလး ကဲြလဲြမႈ ရွိေနပါတယ္။ သူတို႔က ဖဲြ႔စည္းပံုအတုိင္းလုပ္ေနမယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ မျဖစ္ႏုိင္ဘူးေလ။ ဘာလို႔လဲဆိုေတာ့ ၄၃၆ တခုလံုးကို ျပင္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုလႊတ္ေတာ္ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ ၂၀ % ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ အဆိုျပဳၿပီးေတာ့ ေထာက္ခံၿပီးေတာ့ ၇၅ % plus One person ကေနၿပီးေတာ့ ေထာက္ခံမွသာလွ်င္ ျပင္ဖို႔လမ္းပြင့္လာမယ္ေလ။ အဲဒါ ျဖစ္လာဖို႔ဆိုတာ လြယ္တဲ့ကိစၥ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ဘူး။ အဓိကေတာ့ လႊတ္ေတာ္ဦးေဆာင္ေနတာေတာ့ USDP နဲ႔ တပ္က ၂၅ % ကို ကိုင္ထားတဲ့ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္မႉးႀကီးမင္းေအာင္လႈိင္ေပၚမွာ မူတည္လိမ့္မယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္ကေတာ့ သံုးသပ္မိပါတယ္။ ”

ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ဦး၀ဏၰေမာင္လြင္ရဲ႕ ကုလသမဂၢညီလာခံ မိန္႔ခြန္းထဲမွာ ျမန္မာႏုုိင္ငံရဲ႕ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအေျခအေနဟာ တိုုးတက္ေနၿပီ၊ ေနာက္ၿပီး အမ်ဳိးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မတီကိုလည္း ဥပေဒနဲ႔အညီ ဖဲြ႔စည္းထားၿပီးသားျဖစ္တာေၾကာင့္ ကုလသမဂၢရဲ႕ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကိစၥရပ္ေတြမွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို ဆက္ၿပီး ထည့္သြင္းေဆြးေႏြးဖို႔ မသင့္ေတာ့ဘူးလို႔ေျပာသြားပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ လူမ်ဳိးေရးအဓိက႐ုဏ္းေတြမၾကာခဏျဖစ္ပြားေနတာ၊ လူ႕အခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖာက္က်ဴးလြန္ေနတာေတြ
အပါအ၀င္ လူ႕အခြင့္အေရးကိုအကာအကြယ္ေပးႏိုင္တဲ့ တရားဥပေဒကို အေကာင္အထည္ေဖၚမယ့္ နည္းလမ္း  ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာမရွိေသးတဲ့အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီး ေတာင္းဆိုသလိုမ်ဳိး အလြယ္တကူနဲ႔ေတာ့ ျဖစ္မလာႏိုင္ဘူးလို႔ အာရွ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ရဲ႕ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာတာ၀န္ခံ ဦးမင္းလြင္ဦးကေျပာပါတယ္။

“ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္းမွာ ဥပေဒျပဌာန္းတဲ့အခါမွာ ဥပေဒေတြ ဘယ္ေန႔ ဘယ္ရက္မွာ အာဏာတည္မယ္ ဆိုတာေတြကိုလည္း ေသေသခ်ာခ်ာ ထုတ္ျပန္ျပဌာန္းထားျခင္း မရွိဘူး။ ဒီဥပေဒေတြကို အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ဖို႔အတြက္ လိုအပ္တဲ့နည္းဥပေဒေတြကိုလည္း ဘယ္ေတာ့ ထုတ္ျပန္မယ္ဆိုတာေတြကို ရွင္းရွင္းလင္းလင္း က်ေနာ္တို႔ မသိရဘူး။ ဒါေတြေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္မႈေတြကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္အံုးမယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ႏိုင္ငံျခား အဖဲြ႔အစည္းေတြအေနနဲ႔ေကာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အဖဲြ႔အစည္းေတြကပါ ဆက္လက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေလ့လာေစာင့္ၾကည့္သင့္တဲ့ အေျခအေနမ်ဳိးျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ပဲ က်ေနာ္ကေတာ့ ေျပာခ်င္ပါတယ္။”

သတင္းမီဒီယာလြတ္လပ္ခြင့္နဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔လည္း ျမန္မာအစိုးရက ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးေနတယ္လို႔ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးက ထုတ္ေဖၚေျပာဆိုသြားပါတယ္။ မီဒီယာလြတ္လပ္ခြင့္ေတြကိုအကာအကြယ္ေပးမယ့္ ဥပေဒေတြကို ျပဌာန္းႏိုင္ေအာင္ ႀကိဳးစားေနတယ္လို႔ဆိုပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ သတင္းေထာက္ေတြကို ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈေတြ၊ တရားစဲြမႈေတြကို ထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ မွ်မွ်တတ အကာအကြယ္မေပးႏိုင္ေသးဘူးလို႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ဓါတ္ပံုသတင္းေထာက္ ကိုစိုးေဇယ်ထြန္းက ေျပာျပပါတယ္။

“ဒီမိုကေရစီအစိုးရလို႔ ေၾကညာထားတာျဖစ္တဲ့အတြက္ေၾကာင့္မို႔လို႔ ဒီမိုကေရစီအစိုးရရဲ႕အဂၤါရပ္ေတြထဲက တခုျဖစ္တဲ့ Media Freedom ဆိုတာကို သူတို႔ရဲ႕ မီဒီယာလြတ္လပ္ခြင့္ကေတာ့ မျဖစ္မေန သူတို႔ ေပးရမွာပဲ။ ဒါ သူတို႔ရဲ႕တာဝန္ပဲ၊ ၿပီးသြားလို႔ရွိရင္ တခါတေလက် မီဒီယာသမားေတြကို ပုဒ္မေတြ တပ္ၿပီး တရားစဲြတာမ်ဳိးေတြ ရွိပါတယ္။ သို႔ေသာ္ တရားစဲြတယ္ဆိုတဲ့ေနရာမွာ တရားမွ်တဖို႔ေတာ့ လိုလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ေတာ့ ထင္ပါတယ္။”

(၆၉)ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ကုုလသမဂၢအေထြေထြညီလာခံမွာျမန္မာႏုုိင္ငံျခားေရး၀န္ႀကီးဦး၀ဏၰေမာင္လြင္ေျပာဆို
ခ်က္အေပၚတုံ႔ျပန္ခ်က္ေတြကို စုစည္းတင္ျပခဲ့တာပါရွင္။

Sunday, September 28, 2014

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BURMA/MYANMAR: Student Activist Phyu Hnin Htwe Falsely Accused of Abduction

September 26, 2014

Ms. Phyu Hnin Htwe, a 23-year-old, member of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU) from Yadanabon University, Mandalay has been falsely implicated in the abduction of two Chinese workers from an army-backed copper mine project. On 20 September 2014, four months after the incident, she was arrested in her hometown under Penal Code Section 364 and 368. She is currently detained in Monywa Prison and awaiting trial in Yinmabin District Court. Ms. Phyu Hnin Htwe has already attended two trials. Her lawyer has applied for bail on September 23, but it has not been granted.

On 18 May 2014, three workers, one Burmese worker and two Chinese workers of the Wanbao Mining Company’s Letpadaung Copper Mine Project, were illegally detained by the local people from Yinmabin Township. The workers had come to the village to survey the land, but the villagers, whose lands were seized for the project, abducted the workers; they were concerned that the government was ignoring them in favour of the Chinese company. The villagers immediately released the Burmese worker but intended to use their detention of the two Chinese workers to draw the government’s attention to their grievances. The following day, local authorities negotiated with the people granting them the right to use their land again and preventing the company from further fencing off sections of the area. The villagers set the two Chinese workers free, after the verbal agreement with the authorities.

While these events were taking place, Ms. Phyu Hnin Htwe was at the home of a local family, tutoring their children. She was not involved in kidnapping the workers. According to local sources, she was only present in the area to volunteer help to local students and to provide support for the people who had lost their lands. Nevertheless, she has been accused of helping the villagers kidnap the workers. The members of the victim’s student union, among others, believe that membership in the union is one of the main reason she is being singled out by the government.

On 22 May 2014, the court charged seven people, including Ms. Phyu Hnin Htwe, for the abduction. Five of the seven were arrested, charged, convicted, but then pardoned. There has been no attempt to arrest the other two, including Ms. Phyu Hnin Htwe, at the time. Now that Ms. Phyu Hnin Htwe has been arrested, only one of the seven remains at large.

Letpadaung Copper Mine Project is being operated by the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited and Wanbao Mining Company, China. There are many nationwide objections to the project, because of the side-effects that impact the environment and livelihood of local people. Activists who were helping the local people in the Letpadaung area had been prosecuted with various offenses (see AHRC-STM-173-2013 and AHRC-STM-082-2013. The plaintiff of the case is an employee of the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited.

The Asian Human Rights Commission condemns the politically motivated prosecution of a young student for crime that she has not committed. The AHRC urges the courts to act independently, consider the facts, dismiss the case, and release the girl immediately.

Monday, September 22, 2014

စက္ရံုလုပ္သားေတြ အကာအကြယ္ကင္းမဲ့ေနတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းေဆြးေႏြးခ်က္(RFA Burmese)


ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ႏိုင္ငံျခားသားပိုင္ စက္ရံုအလုပ္ ရံုေတြမွာ အလုပ္သမားေတြကို အကာအကြယ္ေပး မယ့္ စည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းေတြ ကင္းမဲ့ေနလို႔ ဆႏၵျပပြဲေတြ မၾကာခဏ ျဖစ္ေနရပံုအေၾကာင္း တရားလႊတ္ေတာ္ ဝါရင့္ေရွ႕ေနႀကီး ဦးေအာင္သိန္း နဲ႔ အာရွလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ ျမန္မာနိင္ငံ တာဝန္ခံ ဦးမင္းလြင္ဦးတို႔ကို ဆက္သြယ္ၿပီး ဦးခင္ေမာင္ညိန္းက ေဆြးေႏြးတင္ျပထားပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက ႏိုင္ငံျခားသားပိုင္ စက္ရံုအလုပ္ရံုေတြမွာ အလုပ္သမားေတြကို အကာအကြယ္ေပးမယ့္ စည္းမ်ဥ္းစည္းကမ္းေတြ ကင္းမဲ့ေနလို႔ ဆႏၵျပပြဲေတြ မၾကာခဏ ျဖစ္ေနရပံုအေၾကာင္း တရားလႊတ္ေတာ္ ဝါရင့္ေရွ႕ေနႀကီး ဦးေအာင္သိန္းနဲ႔ အာရွလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ ျမန္မာနိင္ငံ တာဝန္ခံ ဦးမင္းလြင္ဦးတို႔ကို ဆက္သြယ္ၿပီး ဦးခင္ေမာင္ညိန္းက ေဆြးေႏြးတင္ျပထားပါတယ္။


Sunday, September 21, 2014

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BURMA/MYANMAR: Private company and government official pursue false charges against farmers after government agency grants them use of their land

September 19, 2014

Urgent Appeal Case: AHRC-UAC-134-2014
19 September 2014

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BURMA/MYANMAR: Private company and government official pursue false charges against farmers after government agency grants them use of their land

ISSUES: Land rights; judicial system; fabrication of charges; corruption

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Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that over 200 farmers from Pantanaw Township, Delta Region, are being prosecuted for using government confiscated lands. Some had permission to use their former land, but are now being prosecuted regardless of their legal rights. Around 60 farmers have already been sentencing to jail but more farmers are still facing in trial over a year after the initial confrontations.

CASE NARRATIVE:

In 1994-1995, a military battalion based in Pantanaw township, Pandaung, confiscated over 10,000 acres of farmlands without providing compensation to the original owners. They then transferred it to local military groups, the War Veteran Association (WVA), and private businesses. After 2012 the enactment of the Farmland law, and 2013 Farmers Rights Protection and Promotion of Interest Law, the farmers stopped paying rent because the Farmland Law revoked the applicable tenancy laws. The farmers also began applying the law to reclaim the previously confiscated land; as a result, the farmers got 800 acres of land back from the military.

WVA Land

In the mid 1990s, the military gave 200 acres to the WVA and the association rented the land back to original owners. While the farmers were renting the land they dug the ditches across the farmlands, made dykes and diverted water from Kyonekadoe stream to grow their crops. When the farmers stopped paying rent and asked for their land to be returned, in 2013, the WVA responded by claiming that they had permission from the government to operate a fish hatchery on the land. However, any such project had not yet commenced which meant that the WVA had failed to meet the standards of the law, thus they were still obligated to return the land. The WVA then began arresting farmers for theft and trespass. The accusations are based on the farming practices used during the tenancy period, which had supposedly damaged fish breeding ponds which had never existed.

Pho La Min Trading Company Land

The area known as “lowland plot No 720(B)” was confiscated in 1997 and 1998. Plot No 720(A) was confiscated in 2001 and 2002. These areas were supposed to be for the State Owned Lowland Rice Project on the orders of Senior General Than Shwe and Genaral Thura Shwe Mann, the latter is now the Speaker of the Burmese House of Representative. At some point prior to 2012, the authorities gave all 2,384 acres to Pho La Min Trading Company Limited, which is owned by General Mann‘s family. The company leased plots to farmers from both the immediate area, and the local region. The company used this to claim that they cooperated with the farmers, allowing them to use the land until 2012.

In both cases, the farmers applied to the Land Acquisition and Investigation Commission, and other government departments concerned with land ownership, for the documents that would allow the farmers to repossess their lands. However, the Pho La Min Company and WVA have instead made a concerted effort to undermine the legal position of the farmers.

In 2013, 15 farmers from Khanwe Khabo Village, Pantanaw Township complained about the conduct of the groups retaining ownership of the land that violated the 2012 farmland law. On January 28th of that year, government authorities came to the fields, surveyed the area, found that it belonged to the farmers, and authorized them to use it immediately. When the farmers cultivated the land and grew crops on over 100 acres of the land, Pho La Min Company field manager U Hla Win filed cases against the farmers accusing them of trespassing in May 2013.

The cases are still going on and some farmers are already in jail.

Further details of the case can be found in the sample letter below, as usual.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

The AHRC is aware of similar prosecutions in recent cases regarding previously confiscated land: AHRC-UAU-024 2014 , AHRC-UAC_117-2014 , AHRC-STM-154-2014 , AHRC-STM-162-2014 , AHRC-UAU-025-2014

For many more cases and issues concerning human rights in Burma, visit the AHRC's country homepage: http://www.humanrights.asia/countries/burma

SUGGESTED ACTION:

Please write a letter to the following government authorities to release the farmers as soon as possible, to dismiss the cases and give the lands back to the farmers.

Please note that for the purpose of the letter Myanmar is referred to by its traditional name, Burma.

Please also be informed that the AHRC is writing separate letters to the UN Special Rapporteurs on human rights in Myanmar and regional office in Bangkok, calling for their interventions into this matter.

SAMPLE LETTER:

Dear ___________,

MYANMAR: Private company and government official pursue false charges against farmers after government agency grants them use of their land.

Name of victim:

Over 200 farmers from the area were charged
Around 60 farmers received fines and some were imprisoned
Here are some who are facing in trial
Farmers from Kone Shan Gyi village and Sin Do village

1. U Kan Myint,
2. U Sein Than,
3. U Kan Aye,
4. U Ah Kyaw,
5. U Nay San,
6. U Barbu,
7. U Thaung Win,
8. U Pho Cho,
9. U Git Too,
10. U Soe Aung,
11. U Than Tun New,
12. U Mya Thaung,
13. U San Kin,
14. U Pho Htaung,
15. U Than Win Naing,
16. U Ko Phone,
17. U Aung Myint,
18. U Char Phit,
19. U Nga To

Farmers from Khanwekhabo village and Kyakhattaw village

1. U Aye Kyaw,
2. U Nyunt Maung,
3. U Kyaw Naing Oo,
4. U Hla Kywe,
5. U Maung Maung Naing,
6. U Pauk Sa
7. Ko Gin Mayi,
8. U Nyunt Maung,
9. U Aung That,
10. Daw Nan Mati,
11. U Pan Aye

Names of perpetrators:

1. U HLa Aung (War Veteran Association),
2. U Hla Win (field manager, Pho La Min Trading Company)
Cases Against Farmers: Penal Code Section 427 and Section 447, Section 143, 
ection 379

Places of Incident:

1: Moe Koke Dee Dote Kwin,
2: Kone Shan
3: Bawdinauk Kwin,
4: Khanwe Khabo and,
5: Kyakhattaw,
6:Chaung Gyi village, PyaLin Village tract

All villages of Pantanaw Township

I am writing to express my deep concern that farmers from Pantanaw Township has been prosecuted because they use confiscated lands that were supposed to have been returned to them after the new farmland law was enacted.

According to the information that I have received, in 1994-1995, a military battalion based in Pantanaw township, Pandaung, confiscated over 10,000 acres of farmlands without providing compensation to the original owners. They then transferred it to local military groups, the War Veteran Association (WVA), and private businesses. After 2012 the enactment of the Farmland law, and 2013 Farmers Rights Protection and Promotion of Interest Law, the farmers stopped paying rent because the Farmland Law revoked the applicable tenancy laws. The farmers also began applying the law to reclaim the previously confiscated land; as a result, the farmers got 800 acres of land back from the military.

WVA Land

In the mid 1990s, the military gave 200 acres to the WVA and the association rented the land back to original owners. While the farmers were renting the land they dug the ditches across the farmlands, made dykes and diverted water from Kyonekadoe stream to grow their crops. When the farmers stopped paying rent and asked for their land to be returned, in 2013, the WVA responded by claiming that they had permission from the government to operate a fish hatchery on the land. However, any such project had not yet commenced which meant that the WVA had failed to meet the standards of the law, thus they were still obligated to return the land. The WVA then began arresting farmers for theft and trespass. The accusations are based on the farming practices used during the tenancy period, which had supposedly damaged fish breeding ponds which had never existed.

Pho La Min Trading Company Land

The area known as “lowland plot No 720(B)” was confiscated in 1997 and 1998. Plot No 720(A) was confiscated in 2001 and 2002. These areas were supposed to be for the State Owned Lowland Rice Project on the orders of Senior General Than Shwe and Genaral Thura Shwe Mann, the latter is now the Speaker of the Burmese House of Representative. At some point prior to 2012, the authorities gave 2,384 acres to Pho La Min Trading Company Limited, which is owned by General Mann‘s family. The company leased plots to farmers from both the immediate area, and the local region. The company used this to claim that they cooperated with the farmers, allowing them to use the land until 2012.

In both cases, the farmers applied to the Land Acquisition and Investigation Commission, and other government departments concerned with land ownership, for the documents that would allow the farmers to repossess their lands. However, the Pho La Min Company and WVA have instead made a concerted effort to undermine the legal position of the farmers.

In 2013, 15 farmers from Khanwe Khabo Village, Pantanaw Township complained about the conduct of the groups retaining ownership of the land that violated the 2012 farmland law. On January 28th of that year, government authorities came to the fields, surveyed the area, found that it belonged to the farmers, and authorized them to use it immediately. When the farmers cultivated the land and grew crops on over 100 acres of the land, Pho La Min Company field manager U Hla Win filed cases against the farmers accusing them of trespassing in May 2013.

While many cases are still going on, some farmers are already in jail. Therefore, I urge the courts to dismiss the cases and the government to return the lands to original owner in accordance with law. I also urge the government to set the farmers free and help them protect their rights.

Yours sincerely,



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PLEASE SEND YOUR LETTERS TO:

1. Lt-Gen. Ko Ko
Minister for Home Affairs
Ministry of Home Affairs
Office No. 10
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 412 079/ 549 393/ 549 663
Fax: +95 67 412 439

2. U Thein Sein
President of Myanmar
President Office
Office No.18
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

3. U Tun Tun Oo
Chief Justice
Office of the Supreme Court
Office No. 24
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: + 95 67 404 080/ 071/ 078/ 067 or + 95 1 372 145
Fax: + 95 67 404 059

4. Dr. Tun Shin
Attorney General
Office of the Attorney General
Office No. 25
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 404 088/ 090/ 092/ 094/ 097
Fax: +95 67 404 146/ 106

5. U Kyaw Kyaw Htun
Director General
Myanmar Police Force
Ministry of Home Affairs
Office No. 10
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 412 079/ 549 393/ 549 663
Fax: +951 549 663 / 549 208

6. Thura U Aung Ko
Chairman
Pyithu Hluttaw Judicial and Legislative Committee
Pythu Hluttaw Office
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

7. U Aung Nyein
Chairman
Pyithu Hluttaw Judicial and Legislative Committee
Committee for Public Complaints and Appeals
Office of the Amyotha Hluttaw
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

8. U Win Mra
Chairman
Myanmar National Human Rights Commission
27 Pyay Road
Hlaing Township
Yangon
MYANMAR
Tel: +95-1-659 668 
Fax: +95-1-659 668

9. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
Chairwoman
Pyithu Hluttaw Rule of Law and Tranquility Committee
Office of the Pyithu Hluttaw
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

Thank you.

Urgent Appeals Programme

Asian Human Rights Commission (ua@ahrc.asia)

Document Type :Urgent Appeal Case
Document ID :AHRC-UAC-134-2014
Countries : Burma (Myanmar)
Issues : Corruption, Fabrication of charges, Judicial system, Land rights

Thursday, September 18, 2014

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ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢ၀င္ မျဖဴႏွင္းေထြး ဖမ္းဆီးခံရမွႈ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအဖြဲ႔ေ၀ဖန္ ( VOA Burmese)

Interview with Human Rights Lawyer Min Lwin Oo

by ကိုသားညြန္႔ဦး

အခုႏွစ္အေစာပိုင္းတုန္းက လက္ပံေတာင္းေတာင္ ေၾကးနီစီမံကိန္းက တ႐ုတ္၀န္ထမ္းႏွစ္ဦးကို ျပန္ေပးဆဲြတယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အမႈနဲ႔ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢ အဖဲြ႔၀င္ ျဖဴႏွင္းေထြးကို အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက ဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢ အဖဲြ႔၀င္ေတြေရာ ေဒသခံေတြပါ ကန္႔ကြက္ဆႏၵျပမႈေတြ ရိွေနပါတယ္။

AHRC အာရွလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ကေတာ့ ဒါကို ကန္႔ကြက္လိုက္ၿပီး၊ ေဒသခံေတြအေရး ေက်ာင္းသားေတြက ၀င္ေရာက္ကူညီတာကို အာဏာပိုင္ေတြက အၿငိဳးထားတဲ့လုပ္ရပ္ ျဖစ္ပံုရတယ္လို႔ ဗီြအိုေအကို ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒီကိစၥနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး AHRC က ျမန္မာေရွ႕ေန ဦးမင္းလြင္ဦးကို ကိုသားညြန္႔ဦးက ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္းထားပါတယ္။
ေမး။             ။ ေက်ာင္းသားသမဂၢ အဖြဲ႔၀င္တဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ မျဖဴႏွင္းေထြးကို အာဏာပိုင္ေတြကေန တေလာတုန္းက ဖမ္းဆီးလိုက္တဲ့ကိစၥနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ေက်ာင္းသားတက္ႂကြလႈပ္ရွားသူ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက ကန္႔ကြက္မႈေတြ ရိွေနပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ ေဒသခံေတြကလည္း အဲ့ဒါကို ဆႏၵျပတာေတြ ရွိပါတယ္။ အဲေတာ့ ဒီအမႈနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ AHRC အေနနဲ႔ ဘယ္လိုျမင္သလဲခင္ဗ်။ အမႈက မွ်မွ်တတ ရွိရဲ႕လား။
ေျဖ။              ။ “တကယ့္ ေဒသခံေတြလည္းျဖစ္တဲ့သူေတြကိုေတာင္ မွ ေက်ေအးၿပီးေတာ့ ျပန္လည္ လႊတ္ေပးၿပီးၿပီဆုိရင္ ျဖဴႏွင္းေထြးကို ဒီပုဒ္မနဲ႔ ဆက္လက္ၿပီးေတာ့ အေရးယူထားတဲ့ဥစၥာက မျဖစ္သင့္ဘူးလို႔ပဲ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ျမင္ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီးေတာ့တခါ ဒီလိုမ်ိဳး လုပ္ေဆာင္တဲ့ကိစၥမွာလည္း သာမန္အမ်ိဳးသမီးတေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ ဒီလိုလုပ္ေဆာင္ႏုိင္ဖို႔ဆုိတာက အလြန္တရာ ခဲယဥ္းတယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီးေတာ့တခါ အခင္းျဖစ္ပြားစဥ္ကလည္း ဒီဖမ္းဆီးထိန္းသိမ္းျခင္းခံရတဲ့ ေဒသခံႏွစ္ဦးနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ အမႈမဖြင့္ဘူးဆုိတာေတြ၊ အေရးယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္းမျပဳဘူး ဆုိတာေတြကို ဒီ၀မ္ေဘာင္စက္႐ံုကေနၿပီးေတာ့ ကတိေတြေပးထားတယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ သိရပါတယ္။ အဲ့ဒါေၾကာင့္လည္း ရြာသား ၅ ဦးကို ေက်ေအးၿပီးေတာ့ လႊတ္လိုက္တယ္ဆုိတာကို က်ေနာ္တို႔ သိရပါတယ္။ ဒီအမႈနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ရြာသူရြာသားေတြနဲ႔သာ သက္ဆုိင္တယ္၊ ျဖဴႏွင္းေထြးနဲ႔ေတာ့ ဒီကိစၥက ပတ္သက္ဖို႔ သိပ္လမ္းမျမင္ဘူးလို႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ျမင္ပါတယ္။”
ေမး။             ။ အခု ဒီ သူ႔ရဲ႕ျပႆနာနဲ႔တဆက္တည္းပါ ဒီႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားဆိုတဲ့ အဓိပၸါယ္သတ္မွတ္က်တဲ့ ကိစၥကလည္း နည္းနည္း႐ႈပ္ေထြးေနပါတယ္ခင္ဗ်။ အဲေတာ့ တက္ႂကြလႈပ္ရွားသူေတြဘက္ကလည္း သူ႔ကို ျပန္လႊတ္ေပးဖို႔ဆုိၿပီးေတာ့ ေတာင္းဆိုေနပါတယ္။ ဆုိေတာ့ ဒီအမႈနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ မျဖဴႏွင္းေထြးဟာ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားဆုိၿပီးေတာ့ သတ္မွတ္ႏုိင္ပါသလား။
ေျဖ။              ။ “ဒီ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္းမွာ ဖြဲ႔ထားတဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္း သားမ်ား ျပန္လည္ စိစစ္ေရးေကာ္မတီကိုေတာင္မွ သူတုိ႔က ဖ်က္သိမ္းၿပီးေတာ့ လုပ္ဖို႔ အစီအစဥ္ ရွိေနၿပီေလဗ်ာ။ အဲေတာ့ ဒီျပစ္မႈေတြနဲ႔ စြပ္စြဲခံရတဲ့ ကိစၥရပ္ေတြမွာေတာ့ သူတို႔က ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား မရွိဘူး။ ဒါက ရာဇ၀တ္မႈေတြနဲ႔ စြဲဆိုထားတာပဲ ျဖစ္တယ္ဆုိၿပီးေတာ့ကာ အစိုးရဘက္ကေတာ့ ေျပာမွာေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ အဲ့ဒီလိုပဲ တခ်ိန္လံုး ေတာက္ေလွ်ာက္ ျငင္းပယ္လာခဲ့တာပဲ။”
ေမး။             ။ ဟုတ္ကဲ့ ကိုမင္းလြင္ဦးအျမင္ကေရာ မျဖဴွႏွင္းေထြးအမႈက ျပန္ေပးမႈပါတယ္၊ ေနာက္တခါ တရား႐ံုးကို ဆင့္ေခၚတာ မလာတဲ့အမႈ ပါပါတယ္။ အဲေတာ့ ဒီအမႈက ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားလို႔ေရာ သတ္မွတ္လို႔ရလား၊ ကိုမင္းလြင္ဦးအျမင္။
ေျဖ။              ။ “ဒီဥစၥာက က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ျပန္ေျပာလို႔ရွိရင္ နည္းနည္းေတာ့ ေနာက္ေၾကာင္းျပန္လွည့္ဖို႔ လိုတာေပါ့ေနာ္။ အဲေတာ့ ဘာျဖစ္လဲဆုိေတာ့ကာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဒီ ၂၀၀၇ တုန္းကလည္း ဗမာႏုိင္ငံလုံးဆုိင္ရာ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားသမဂၢ ဖြဲ႔စည္းဖို႔အတြက္ ဆိုၿပီးေတာ့ မဟန္နီဦးတို႔ ရာဟုေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ေမာင္တို႔၊ စည္သူေမာင္တို႔၊ မတင္ဇာခိုင္တို႔၊ သင္းဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းေရးဥပေဒနဲ႔ အေရးယူခံရတာေတြ ရွိပါတယ္။ အဲ့ဒီမွာ ဟန္နီဦးကို စာေမးပြဲေျဖေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာပဲ စာေမးပြဲမေျဖဘဲနဲ႔ ဒီ ကုန္ေစ်းႏႈန္းက်ဆင္းေရးအတြက္ စီတန္းလမ္းေလွ်ာက္တဲ့အထဲမွာ ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီးေတာ့ အသင္းအဖြဲ႔ ဖြဲ႔စည္းေရးအတြက္ ဦးေဆာင္လႈပ္ရွားတယ္ဆုိၿပီးေတာ့ အျပစ္ေပးခဲ့တာေတြ ရွိတယ္။ အဲ့ဒါ ဗကသ ဖြဲ႔စည္းေရးအတြက္ ေဆာင္ရြက္တဲ့ကိစၥရပ္ေတြေပါ့ေနာ္။ အခုလည္းတခါ လာျပန္ၿပီ။ ဒီလိုမ်ိဳး ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ ပါ၀င္ပတ္သက္တယ္ဆုိတဲ့အေပၚမွာ အၿငိဳးအေတးနဲ႔ လုပ္ခဲ့တယ္ဆုိရင္ေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔အေနနဲ႔ ဒါကေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံေရးေနာက္ခံ မကင္းတဲ့အတြက္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားလို႔ပဲ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ကေတာ့ သတ္မွတ္ရမွာပါပဲ။”
ေမး။             ။ အၿငိဳးအေတးေတြ ျဖစ္မယ္ဆုိရင္ေတာ့လုိ႔ ကိုမင္းလြင္ဦး က ေျပာတယ္ဆုိေတာ့ ဒီကိစၥက အၿငိဳးအေတးျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ေရာ ယူဆလို႔ ရလို႔လား။
ေျဖ။              ။ “က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အျမင္ကေတာ့ေပါ့ဗ်ာ ဒီလက္ပံေတာင္းေတာင္ အေရးကိစၥမွာ ေဒသခံေတာင္သူလယ္သမားေတြကို အႀကံေပးတာ၊ ကူညီတာ၊ ေတာင္သူလယ္သမား အေရးေတြကို တက္တက္ႂကြႂကြ လုိက္လံေျဖရွင္းေပးတာ၊ ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားေတြကို ပညာေပးတာ စတဲ့ကိစၥရပ္ေတြမွာ ဒီေက်ာင္းသားေတြ ပါ၀င္ပတ္သက္လို႔သာ ဒီေဒသခံ ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားေတြက ဆူပူအံုႂကြရတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ အျမင္ အစိုးရမွာ ရွိေနတယ္။ အဲဒါကေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဒီ လက္ပံေတာင္းေတာင္ကိစၥကို ေလ့လာလုိက္တဲ့တေလွ်ာက္လံုး၊ ေနာက္ၿပီးေတာ့ ေတာင္သူလယ္သမား အေရးကိစၥရပ္ေတြ ေလ့လာတဲ့ ကိစၥတေလွ်ာက္လံုးေတြမွာ ဒါေတြက ေက်ာင္းသားေတြအေပၚမွာ အၿငိဳးထားတယ္ဆုိတာေတြကို က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ေတြ႔ေနရပါတယ္။”

Monday, September 15, 2014

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BURMA/MYANMAR: Twenty-one more farmers falsely convicted for pursuing their land rights

ASIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION - URGENT APPEALS PROGRAMME

Urgent Appeal Update: AHRC-UAU-025-2014

15 September 2014

[BURMA/MYANMAR: Over 450 Farmers Victimised by Myanmar Military Land Grabbing]
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BURMA/MYANMAR: Twenty-one more farmers falsely convicted for pursuing their land rights

ISSUES: Land rights; judicial system; fabrication of charges; corruption
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Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received updated information that twenty-one more farmers from Kanbalu Township have been convicted regarding an attempt to defend their rights to their land, with sentences ranging from 3 months to 4 years. More farmers are being prosecuted this month and others are still facing trials.

CASE NARRATIVE:

As described in the original appeal (AHRC-UAC-109-2014), farmers from Kanbalu Township, whose lands were confiscated by the military during the military regime, are being prosecuted by the military and the Myanmar Economic Corporation for attempting to take back their land. The lands were grabbed by the military but without providing compensation thus violating the Land Acquisition Act. The farmers have also been forced to move their houses from the land and their crops have been destroyed by the military (See: AHRC-STM-162-2014). 

AHRC-UAU-025-2014-01.jpgAccording to the latest information received, 21 more farmers from Mya Mon village, Kanbalu Township, have been prosecuted on 20 August 2014. Several of them are from the same family. One person prosecuted passed away 6 years ago. The most recent judgment determine that the farmers are guilty of a crime of trying to take possession of their own land. 

This judgment also adds that the farmers not being aware that pursuing their right to the land is a crime is neither a defense, nor a mitigating factor. The judge has also remarked that this judgment reflects the military’s desire to punish the farmers. AHRC-UAU-025-2014-02.jpg

Thus, this is a clear miscarriage of justice and more pressure must be put on the government of Burma to put an end to this persecution.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Land grabbing and prosecution of farmers occur all over Burma. Following government reforms, the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Services ordered such confiscated land to be returned back to the original owners. But, the President informed Parliament on 2 July 2014 that the government could not return over 350,000 acres of confiscated land, as they were still in use. Contradiction in the information of the President and the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Services has left farmers confused and lack of the rule of law has made the problem worse. Further details can be found in the sample letter below.

SUGGESTED ACTION:
Please write a letter to the following government authorities to urge the government to respond to the injustices that the military continues to perpetrate against farmers. A sample letter follows. Please note that for the purpose of the letter Myanmar is referred to by its traditional name, Burma.

Please also be informed that the AHRC is writing separate letters to the UN Special Rapporteurs on human rights in Myanmar; on the independence of judges and lawyers; and to the UN Regional Office in Bangkok, calling for their interventions into this matter.

SAMPLE LETTER:

Dear ……………,

BURMA/MYANMAR: Twenty-one more farmers falsely convicted for pursuing their land rights

Names of victims:
Over 350 farmers from Kanbalu Township

Farmers from Mya Mon prosecuted on 20 August 2014:
1. U Saw Tun
2. U Than Win
3. U Tin Win 
4. Daw Khin Htay Myint 
5. Daw Khin Thein Oo
6. U Kyaw Wai
7. U Kyaw Ngwe
8. U Win Htoo
9. U Khine Min
10. U Tun Tun
11. U Saw Nyunt (son of 13, passed away 6 years ago)
12. U Saw Shwe (son of 13)
13. U Hla Khin (father of 11 & 12)
14. U Thein (father of 15)
15. U Aung Thu (son of 14)
16. U Win Tin
17. U Nay Myo Aung (brother of 18)
18. U Zaw Ni Aung (brother of 17)
19. U Tun Kha
20. U Khin Maung
21. U Aung Sein

Names of perpetrators: 
1. Police Corporal Zaw Myint
2. Other military officials

Cases Against Farmers: Penal Code Section 427 and Section 447
Place of Incident: Kanbalu Township Court, Sagaing Region, Myanmar
Name of Judge: U Okka Maung, Kanbalu Township Court No.1

I am disappointed to hear of the judgment from the Kanbalu Township Court, which has determined that more farmers have unknowingly committed a crime by pursing their legal right to their lands. The judge in the case has noted the farmers’ historic claim to the land, and revealed that his judgment was not based on justice, but on military pressure.

According to the latest information I have received, 21 more farmers from Mya Mon village, Kanbalu Township, have been prosecuted on 20 August 2014. Several of them are from the same family, and one person who was prosecuted passed away 6 years ago. Other farmers are still waiting to complete the trial process.

The most recent judgment determine that the farmers are guilty of trying to take possession of their own land. This judgment also adds that the farmers not being aware that pursuing their right to the land is a crime is neither a defense, nor a mitigating factor. The judge has noted that these lands belonged to the farmers a long time ago and recognizes that this was not a just judgment; the judge has stated that he has ruled this way because of pressure from the military.

The livelihood of these farmers has been threatened. Almost all the farmers from the different villages in the area have insufficient time for work and family due to persecution at the hands of the military. They have spent their time and money for their legal defense. One farmer’s wife, who has a 6-month-old baby, has developed a mental disorder, since her husband began languishing in jail.

I have learned that land grabbing and prosecution of farmers is occurring all over Burma. Following government reform, the Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services ordered the land to be returned to the original owners. But, the President informed Parliament on 2 July 2014 that the government could not return over 350,000 acres of confiscated land, as the Myanmar State was using the same. Contradictory information from the president and the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Services has left the farmers confused, and lack of the rule of law has made the problem worse.

Therefore, I urge the courts to dismiss the cases, set the farmers free, and return the land to its original owners as soon as possible. Because the judges themselves admit being influenced by the military, justice and rule of law is not possible in the current situation. I urge the government to intervene directly to address such unfair practices. 

I look forward to your positive and effective response in this case.

Yours Sincerely,

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PLEASE SEND YOUR LETTERS TO:

1. Lt-Gen. Ko Ko
Minister for Home Affairs
Ministry of Home Affairs
Office No. 10
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 412 079/ 549 393/ 549 663
Fax: +95 67 412 439

2. U Thein Sein
President of Myanmar
President Office
Office No.18
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

3. U Tun Tun Oo
Chief Justice
Office of the Supreme Court
Office No. 24
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: + 95 67 404 080/ 071/ 078/ 067 or + 95 1 372 145
Fax: + 95 67 404 059

4. Dr. Tun Shin
Attorney General
Office of the Attorney General
Office No. 25
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 404 088/ 090/ 092/ 094/ 097
Fax: +95 67 404 146/ 106

5. U Kyaw Kyaw Htun
Director General
Myanmar Police Force
Ministry of Home Affairs
Office No. 10
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR
Tel: +95 67 412 079/ 549 393/ 549 663
Fax: +951 549 663 / 549 208

6. Thura U Aung Ko
Chairman
Pyithu Hluttaw Judicial and Legislative Committee
Pythu Hluttaw Office
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

7. U Aung Nyein
Chairman
Pyithu Hluttaw Judicial and Legislative Committee
Committee for Public Complaints and Appeals
Office of the Amyotha Hluttaw
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR

8. U Win Mra
Chairman
Myanmar National Human Rights Commission
27 Pyay Road
Hlaing Township
Yangon
MYANMAR
Tel: +95-1-659 668
Fax: +95-1-659 668

9. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
Chairwoman
Pyithu Hluttaw Rule of Law and Tranquility Committee
Office of the Pyithu Hluttaw
Naypyitaw
MYANMAR


Thank you.

Urgent Appeals Programme
Asian Human Rights Commission (ua@ahrc.asia)

Sunday, September 14, 2014

ASIA: Weekly Roundup, Episode 44

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AHRC-ANM-037-2014

September 14, 2014

An Announcement from the Asian Human Rights Commission

ASIA: Weekly Roundup, Episode 44

Burma is the focus of the 44th episode of AHRC TV’s Weekly Roundup.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9dB8RPx-a8&feature=youtu.be>

In this episode, AHRC TV talks to Mr. Kyaw Swar Swe, Director, Myanmar
Institute for Democracy, Mr. Tun Hlaing, a Burmese lawyer, and Mr. Min
Lwin Oo, a rights defender.

 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9dB8RPx-a8&feature=youtu.be>

The programme includes reports on the 10-year prison sentence for
Burmese human rights defender Mr. Ko Htin Kyaw and expectations ahead
of the second country report of the Parliamentary Committee for Rule
of Law, headed by Aung San Suu Kyi.

The thaw in Burma, following decades of military dictatorship, raised
hope that respect for human rights and the rule of law will follow.
The professionals interviewed and the stories covered in this episode
indicate where Burma stands vis-à-vis these expectations.

The bulletin can be watched online at AHRC YouTube
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