• Election and Pledge Project (Part -6)

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts on Oct 30, 2020

    One of the reasons discrimination persists is because the state – the institution whose responsibility it is to protect equality and human rights for all people are not able to understand what it feels like to be marginalised and discriminated against. Given all political and economic institutions in Myanmar are overwhelmingly led by older Bamar men it is perhaps unsurprising that, for example, the Hluttaw regularly brings forward legislation on economic matters that will help the government’s friends in business; but when asked to pass a law to protect women from domestic violence it takes over 8 years, and still has not been passed.

  • Election and Pledge Project (Part -5)

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts on Oct 27, 2020

    Public participation in the drafting of policies and laws is extremely limited. When consultation does take place, carefully selected organisations or businesses are invited to give views – others are barred. Some noted a bias in favour of international technical experts to the detriment of local knowledge and expertise. There are no consistently applied open public consultation standards.

  • Election and Pledge Project (Part -4)

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts on Oct 21, 2020

    Amendments to the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Land Management Law (VFV Land Law) and the Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Law (LAARL) are considered particular embarrassments, as they are poorly conceived and do little to protect people’s rights to their land, especially landholdings under customary systems of tenure. Ambiguities in new legislation allows decision makers to take arbitrary decisions about who owns land, evicting farmers whose families have worked plots for generations.

  • Election and Pledge Project (Part -3)

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts on Oct 19, 2020

    In 2019, nearly 100 protesters were charged for engaging in protests, such as anti-war protesters recently charged under the Penal Code. The Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession Law is vaguely worded, and in practice local authorities still think protesters require permission to protest. When peaceful protests do take place, the authorities primarily seek to control and/or shut them down, rather than protect and facilitate citizens’ right to protect.

  • Election and Pledge Project (Part -2)

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts on Oct 16, 2020

    In the absence of a strong independent court system, access to justice often depends on the ability of defendants to pay bribes; on the extent to which other branches of government wish to see a conviction and their undue influence on the process; and often on popular opinion. Frequently, therefore, those most marginalised in wider society are those with least access to impartial and fair treatment in the courts.

  • Election and Pledge Project (Part -1)

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts on Oct 12, 2020

    For many civil society organisations, a key step in the peace step in the process involves transitional or restorative justice, whereby state authorities openly acknowledge rights violations of the past and institute a process of justice and healing. In Myanmar it seems particularly difficult for military or civilian authorities to acknowledges past injustices, even though this has been instrumental in the peace processes of many other post-conflict societies.

  • Alert! Election Ahead!

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts, Legislative Research on Aug 28, 2020

    Many people have fought long and hard for the right to vote in Myanmar. The UEC and all state institutions should be rejoicing in the opportunity people now have to freely discuss and debate political ideas ahead of the November poll. But instead, by frightening people with information about potential fines or imprisonment, they are sending out the opposite message.

  • Policy Briefing: Control of Communicable Diseases

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts, Legislative Research on Mar 30, 2020

    Making the right decisions, at the right time, is extremely difficult for policymakers in the face of such an unprecedented global event. Severe restrictions on movement will have major implications for the economy and are likely to be socially and politically destabilising.

  • Amending the Constitution: Reflecting on One Year and Seven Days in the Hluttaw

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts, Legislative Research on Mar 26, 2020

    Since all these promises which are peace, rule of law and Constitution amendment demand a long-term effort, expecting the NLD to have fulfilled them already is probably unfair. However, the question of whether the party has built a good foundation is, on the other hand, a reasonable query. One such foundation to these challenges – trust-building – is perhaps the most important for a conflict-torn country like Myanmar.

  • ပွင့်လင်းမြင်သာမှု နမူနာများ - တောင်ကိုရီးယားနိုင်ငံရဲ့ ပွင့်လင်းအစိုးရ

    Posted in Ideas & Impacts on Oct 23, 2019

    သတိပြုသင့်တဲ့ အချက်က ဒီလိုအောင်မြင်မှုတွေကို တောင်ကိုရီးယား အစိုးရနဲ့ အရပ်ဘက်အဖွဲ့အစည်းတွေ ပူးပေါင်းဆောင်ရွက်မှုကနေ တစ်ဆင့် ရရှိခဲ့တာဖြစ်တယ်ဆိုတဲ့ အချက်ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။ တခါ ပူးပေါင်းဆောင်ရွက်ခြင်း၊ တစ်ခါတစ်ရံ အစိုးရရဲ့ အားနည်းချက်တွေကို ထုတ်ဖော်ပြီး အစိုးရကို ဖိအားပေးခြင်းနည်းလမ်းတွေနဲ့ အရပ်ဘက် အဖွဲ့အစည်းတွေဟာ အစိုးရကို ပြည်သူလူထု အကျိုးစီးပွားအတွက် ဆောင်ရွက်ဖို့ တွန်းအားပေးနိုင်ခဲ့ကြပါတယ်။