Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma’s Statement

We congratulate you on what appears to be a highly successful visit to the United Kingdom and United States of America. After having the opportunity to discuss ongoing human rights issues in Burma with British Prime Minister Theresa May and United States President Barack Obama, we are sure you will agree that support from the international community will be essential in achieving these goals. We thus respectfully request that you commit to ratifying the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, thus allowing Burma to take its place in the community of nations who respect human rights for all.

Our organization, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – Burma, has documented numerous cases of torture by the government and by armed groups. Sadly, torture continues in Burma, despite the election of the National League for Democracy government last year. Doctor Aung Moe Nyo, a former NLD member of parliament who now serves as Prime Minister for Magway District, proposed legislation to ratify the Convention Against Torture in the previous parliament; this legislation was approved by Parliament. The Thein Sein Government pledged to ratify the Convention Against Torture; unfortunately, the Government did not sign Doctor Aung Moe Nyo’s bill before the transition to your NLD government.

Your government now has the ability to ratify the Convention Against Torture and should do so as expeditiously as possible. This is crucial not only to protect the people of Burma, particularly ethnic minority populations, but also to confirm to the international community that the government of Burma will highlight the importance of human rights.

Assistance Association for Political Prisoners

Bo Kyi Joint Secretary +95(0) 942530 8840

ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၏ အတိုင္ပင္ခံပုဂၢိဳလ္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္အား ေမတၱာရပ္ခံခ်က္