Open Letter to President U Htin Kyaw Calling for Reform of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC)

By 111 Myanmar/Burma Civil Society Organizations | May 3, 2016

Honorable Mr. President,

We, the 111  undersigned civil society organizations from Burma/Myanmar, welcome the government’s release of political prisoners and detained students and supporters, who were facing trials, over two occasions on 8 and 17 April 2016. It not only represented a decisive break with repressive practices of the past, but demonstrated firm commitment to democratic governance and human rights protection in the country. We are further encouraged by the early series of reforms, by the new government, that have been pursued, including the recommendation by the Legal Affairs and Special Cases Assessment Commission to repeal or amend repressive laws to ensure that no one shall be punished for exercising their basic rights and freedoms in the country.

However, it is also at this joyous occasion that we recall scores of other activists and human rights defenders who remain imprisoned on politically motivated grounds. Admittedly, a formidable human rights challenge still underlies the country’s democratic transition and it is imperative that accountability and protection mechanisms are strengthened so that genuine “national reconciliation” can be achieved.

In that regard, the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) is an important institution that can contribute significantly to human rights protection and governance in the country. After all, it is the only state-formed organ tasked exclusively to promote and protect human rights, and its creation suggests an institutional approach to addressing and tackling the human rights situation in the country.

However, the MNHRC as it stands today is arguably in a state of “crisis”. The MNHRC has repeatedly proven to be ineffective with little impact on the ground, in particular the inability to render justice to victims of violations and abuses. Such concerns were validated by the global governing body of NHRIs, who accredited the MNHRC with a “B” status for falling short of the minimum and normative standards stipulated in the Paris Principles.

While the MNHRC Act (2014) contains certain broad eligibility criteria for Commission members, it does not amount to a sound and robust selection/appointment process. The founding law is silent on a comprehensive selection criteria and coherent selection processes, including through public hearings and consultations as well as Parliamentary oversight, among others.  It also grants authority to an “Executive-heavy” Selection Board to adopt its own undefined internal procedures while restricting engagement only to “registered” civil society groups.

As such, we believe that fundamental and structural reforms of the MNHRC are urgently needed. The re-constitution of the MNHRC’s leadership body, through the formalization and implementation of a merit-based, inclusive and transparent selection/appointment process of Commission members that involves the broad participation and inputs of independent rights-based civil society, is a crucial first step to repair the legitimacy and public confidence deficits suffered by the MNHRC. The government now has a prime opportunity to strengthen the legal framework and mandate of the MNHRC and should act on the ICC-SCA’s recommendations to ensure the independence, effectiveness and accountability of the MNHRC. We believe that, an MNHRC that is fully compliant with the Paris Principles can be a valuable partner for human rights protection and governance in the country.

We thank you for your attention to this important issue and remain available to provide you with further information as required.

Sincerely,

Signed by-

1. ရခုိင္ျပည္လံုးဆုိင္ရာ ေက်ာင္းသားႏွင့္ လူငယ္မ်ား အစည္းအရံုး (All Arakan Students’ & Youths’ Congress – AASYC)
2. ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအသင္း (ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ) (Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) – AAPP)
3.  ဒီမုိကေရစီဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္ေရး လွဳပ္ရွားေဆာင္ရြက္မႈေကာ္မတီ (Action Committee for Democracy Development – ACDD)
4. လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကာကြယ္ျမွင့္တင္သူမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ (Association of Human Rights Defenders and Promoters – HRDP)
5. အလုပ္သမားအခြင့္အေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ားအဖဲြ႔ (Action Labour Rights – ALR)
6. နယ္လွည့္ေက်ာပုိးအိတ္ က်န္းမာေရးလုပ္သားအဖြဲ႕ (Back Pack Health Worker Team – BPHWT)
7. ျမန္မာ့အေရးပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္သူမ်ားအဖဲြ႔ (Burma Partnership – BP)
8. ျမန္မာ့အမ်ိဳးသမီးသမဂၢ (Burmese Women’s Union – BWU)
9. ကေလးအခြင့္အေရးကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္မႈ ေကာ္္မတီ (ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ) (Committee for Protection and Promotion of Child Rights (Burma) – CPPCR)
10. ကာလာရိန္းဘိုး (Colors Rainbow)
11. လူထုအေျချပဳ ေရရွည္တည္တံ့ ခိုင္ၿမဲေရးႏွင့္ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးေကာ္မတီ (ကမိုေသြး) (Community Sustainable and Livelihood Development – Kamothway – CSLD)
12. ထား၀ယ္ဖြံံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးအဖဲြ႔ (Dawei Development Association – DDA)
13. ထား၀ယ္လယ္သမားသမဂၢ (Dawei Famer Union – DFU)
14. ထား၀ယ္သုေတသနအသင္း (Dawei Research Association – DRA)
15. ညီမွ်ျခင္းျမန္မာ (Equality Myanmar)
16. ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဒီမုိကရက္တစ္အင္အားစု (Forum for Democracy in Burma – FDB)
17. က်ား၊မေရးရာ တန္းတူညီမွ်ေရးကြန္ရက္ (Gender Equality Network – GEN)
18. စစ္မွန္ေသာျပည္သူ႔ေက်းကၽြန္အဖြဲ႕ (Genuine People’s Servants – GPS)
19. လူ႔အခြင္႔အေရးကာကြယ္သူမ်ား – ျမင္းျခံ (Human Rights Defender – Myingyan)
20. မြန္ျပည္ လူ႔အခြင့္ေရးေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း (Human Rights Foundation of Monland – HURFOM)
21. ႏုိင္ငံတကာေငြေၾကးဆုိင္ရာအဖြဲ႔အစည္းမ်ား ေစာင္႔ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႔ (ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ) (IFI Watch Myanmar)
22. ကခ်င္လူမႈဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးကြန္ရက္ (Kachin Development Networking Group – KDNG)
23. ကရင္သဘာ၀ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ႏွင့္ လူမႈေရးဆုိင္ရာလႈပ္ရွားမႈကြန္ရက္ (Karen Environmental and Social Action Network – KESAN)
24. ကြမ္းၿခံကုန္းကြန္ရက္ (Kun Gyan Gon Network – KGGN)
25. ကရင္လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအဖဲြ႔ (Karen Human Rights Group – KHRG)
26. ကလ်ာဏမိတၱေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း (Kalyana Mitta Development Foundation – KMDF)
27. ကခ်င္ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကြန္ရက္ (Kachin Peace Network – KPN)
28.  ေကာင္ေရြ လူမႈလႈပ္ရွားေဆာင္ရြက္ေရး ကြန္ယက္ (Kaung Rwai Social Action Network – KSAN)
29. ကရင္ျမစ္ေခ်ာင္းမ်ားေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးကြန္ရက္ (Karen Rivers Watch – KRW)
30. ကခ်င္အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားအစည္းအရံုး – ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံ (Kachin Women’s Association Thailand – KWAT)
31. ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး (Karen Women’s Organization – KWO)
32. ကခ်င္အမ်ိဳးသမီးၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးကြန္ရက္ (Kachin Women Peace Network – KWPN)
33. လားဟူအမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ ့ (Lahu Women’s Organization – LWO)
34. ေမတၱာဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း (Metta Development Foundation)
35. ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုုးတက္မႈအတြက္ ျမန္မာ႔အိုုင္စီတီအဖြဲ ႔(Myanmar ICT for Development Organization – MIDO)
36. ျမန္မာလူထုမဟာမိတ္ (Myanmar People Alliance)
37. ပညာေရးစနစ္ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး ႏုိင္ငံလုံးဆုိင္ရာ ကြန္ရက္ (National Network for Education Reform – NNER)
38. ဒီမုိကေရစီႏွင့္ဖြံံြ႔ၿဖိဳးတုိးတက္ေရးအင္အားစု (Network for Democracy and Development – NDD)
39. လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးမွတ္တမ္းကြန္ရက္ (ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ) (Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma (ND-Burma))
40. မ်ိဳးဆက္သစ္ (သွ်မ္းျပည္) (New Generation (Shan State))
41. ေပါင္းကူး (Paung Ku)
42. ပေလာင္အမ်ိဳးသမီးအစည္းအရုံး (Palaung Women’s Organization – PWO)
43. ယုံၾကည္ရေသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမ်ားေပၚေပါက္ေရး ျပည္သူမ်ားပူးေပါင္းလႈပ္ရွားမႈအဖြဲ႔ (People’s Alliance for Credible Elections – PACE)
44. ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္တရားမွ်တေရးအဖြဲ႔ (Peace and Justice)
45. ျပည္ႀကီးခင္ (Pyi Gyi Khin – PGK)
46. ပြိဳင့္ – ရုိးရာ၀န္းက်င္ျမႇင့္တင္ေရးအဖဲြ႔ (Promotion Of Indigenous and Nature Together – POINT)
47. ျပည္သူ႔ကြန္ရက္ (ပဲခူးတိုင္း) (Public Network (Bago Division))
48. ကမိုေသြးဌာေနတိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားႏွင့္ သဘာဝေရာင္ျခည္အဖြဲ႔ (Rays of Kamothway and Indigenous People Network)
49. ရွမ္းလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး မ႑ိဳင္ (Shan Human Rights Foundation – SHRF)
50. ေရႊသဘာ၀ဓါတ္ေငြ႔လႈပ္ရွားမႈအဖဲြ႔ (Shwe Gas Movement)
51. ေရႊျခေသၤ႔လူမႈေစာင္႔ေရွာက္ေရးအဖြ႔ဲ(ေရႊဘို) (Shwechinthae Social Service Group (Shwebo))
52. ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ ေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္မ်ား ကြန္ဂရက္ (Students and Youth Congress of Burma – SYCB)
53. သူရိယစႏၵာပတ္ဝန္းက်င္ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႔(မင္းကင္းၿမိဳ႕) (Thuriya Sandra Environmental Watch Group)
54. တအာင္းေက်ာင္းသားႏွင့္လူငယ္မ်ားအစည္းအရုံး (Ta’ang Students and Youth Organization – TSYO)
55. ထား၀ယ္အမ်ိဳးသမီးသမဂၢ (Tavoyan Women’s Union – TWU)
56. ထား၀ယ္လူငယ္အစည္းအရုံး (Tavoyan Youth Organization – TYO)
57. ကရင္နီျပည္ လူငယ္မ်ား သမဂၢ (Union of Karenni State Youth – UKSY)
58. အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားအဖဲြ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ) (Women’s League of Burma – WLB)
59. ဝံလက္ေဒသဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း (ရခိုင္ျပည္) (Wan Lark Development Foundation (Arakan))
60. ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ လူငယ္အေျချပဳ လူမႈ ေျပာင္းလဲေရးအဖြဲ႔ (Youth For Social Change Myanmar)
61. မ်က္ဝန္းသစ္ (အသိပညာရပ္ဝန္း) ပဲခူးတိုင္း၊ အုုတ္ဖိုၿမိဳ႕
62. အလင္းသီတံ (မိုးညိဳၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ပဲခူးတိုင္း)
63. ၿမိဳ႕နယ္လူငယ္အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (သဲကုန္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္)
64. ဧရာဝတီလူငယ္ကြန္ရက္
65. ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားမ်ားနွင့္ေျမယာလုပ္သားမ်ား သမဂၢ (ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ)
66. ဒို႔ေျမကြန္ရက္
67. စိမ္းလန္းျပင္ဦးလြင္
68. ျပင္ဦးလြင္ ေျမယာႏွင့္ ေတာင္သူကြန္ရက္
69. လြတ္လပ္ေသာအရိႈခ်င္းမ်ားအင္အားစု
70. ေစတုတၲရာဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအဖဲြ႔
71. ပ်ိဳးခင္းသစ္ မအူပင္
72. ျမစ္ေကြ႔ဧရာ
73. ေရႊျခၤေသ့ေဇယ်သိဃၤေတာင္သူကြန္ရက္ – ေရႊဘို
74. ရွမ္းေတာင္ကြန္ရက္
75. ျမန္မာ့ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္း အလုပ္သမားမ်ား ပညာေရးေကာ္မတီ (Burmese Migrant Workers’ Education Committee -BMWEC)
76. မြတ္စလင္မ္ အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားေကာင္စီ (ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ) (Muslim Women Council of Myanmar-MWCM)
77. Arakan EITI Watch Committee
78. Arakan Rivers Network (ARN)
79. Ayeyarwady Myanmar Alliance for Transparency and Accountability (MATA) Working Group
80. Ayeyarwady West Development Organization (AWDO)
81. Article 19 Myanmar
82. Burma Issues
83. Burma Link
84. Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People (CIDKP)
85. Candle Light
86. COMREG, Myanmar
87. Center for Youth and Social Harmony
88. Democratic Education Corner
89. Dawei Pro-bono Lawyer Network
90. Dawei Youth Fellowship
91. Future Light Center
92. Free Thinkers
93. Human Rights Educators’ Network
94. Integrated Development Executive Association – IDEA (Shan State)
95. Independent Worker Unions Cooperative Program
96. Justice Movement for Community – Innlay
97. Karen Office of Relief and Development (KORD)
98. Let’s Help Each Other
99. Action Based Community Development (ABCD)
100. People for People – Rakhine State
101. Social Program Aid for Civic Education (SPACE)
102. Shan Students’ Union (Thailand)
103. Southern Youth (Taninthary)
104. Takapaw
105. Taunggyi Education Network
106. Tanintharyi Friends
107. The Seagull: Human Rights, Peace & Development
108. Upper Chindwin Youth Network
109. Uak Thon Local Social Development Organization
110. Women and Peace Action Network (Shan State)
111. Zinlum Committee (တန္ဖဲ)အဖဲြ႔