The All-Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group (PHRG) attended this meeting organised by APPG Burma to hear about human rights issues in the country. Laura Haigh, Burma Researcher at Amnesty International, joined the meeting to discuss Amnesty’s recent report; ‘New expression meets old repression: Ending the cycle of political arrests and imprisonment in Myanmar.’

The main points raised during the meeting were:

• Despite the country opening up, there has been an intensification of arrests of activists, using both old repressive laws and new laws, including the recently adopted telecommunications law.
• Activists are being held for longer periods in detention and there is a wider climate of fear in the country, as threats made against them have risen.
• The authorities are targeting civil society much more intensively than before. In particular, the student movement is being targeted, as well as media workers (not just journalists but editors and publishers too).
• Non-state actors, especially Buddhist nationalist groups, are pushing for politically motivated prosecutions. Moderate voices in Burma are finding it very difficult to raise issues affecting minority ethnic groups, particularly the Rohingya and other Muslims.
• The NLD have shown that there is political will to address the flawed legal system, so this is an important time for the international community to push for legal reform.
• The UK Government should also push for access to the ethnic areas, to improve scrutiny of human rights abuses there.
• Support for human rights defenders is one of the most important ways the UK Government can assist Burma’s progress towards democracy. Such support is particularly important for those working on freedom of religion issues, especially for the Rohingya, and for those working in the ethnic areas. Technical support for judges and lawyers on the ground is also needed.

The PHRG will continue to follow developments in Burma and raise our concerns about human rights in the country whenever possible.