Myanmar National Human Rights Commission
We advocate for an effective MNHRC that demonstrates a commitment to the international standards set forth in the Paris Principles. This includes constructing a meaningful and recurring dialogue with civil society, abolishing the influence of the President and the Myanmar Army, and advocating for the protection of human rights defenders. The international community must also seek to pressure the Myanmar Government into creating an NHRI that is truly in line with the Paris Principles and that proves its dedication to the promotion and protection of human rights.
On 5 September 2011, the Myanmar Government announced that it had established the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MNHRC) which would be charged with promoting and safeguarding the fundamental rights of citizens in accordance with the Principles relating to the Status of National Institutions, otherwise known as the Paris Principles.
Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1993, the Paris Principles set forth minimum standards for the creation of a National Human Rights Institution (NHRI), along with its practical obligations and responsibilities.
With the passing of its enabling law through the Myanmar Parliament in March 2014, the MNHRC established its mandate. In 2015, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions’ Sub-Committee on Accreditation awarded the MNHRC a ‘B’ status, which means the commission is not fully compliant with the Paris Principles.
The establishment of the MNHRC can largely be seen as an attempt at placating the international community at that time; most notably, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tomás Ojea Quintana, who had been calling for the establishment of a UN-led Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes in the country.
Yet so far, the MNHRC has shown it is unable to uphold its mandate of human rights protection and promotion due in large part to a severe lack of independence, effectiveness, and transparency.
Within the enabling law and in regular practice, the President and the Executive have a disproportionate amount of power when selecting new Commission Members while engagement with external stakeholders, a stipulation of the Paris Principles, is absent in the practice of the MNHRC.
Despite only being operational since 2011, the MNHRC has already demonstrated on numerous occasions that it will allow human rights investigations to be overruled or influenced by the Myanmar Army. The controversial prosecution of Brang Shawng, who was charged in a criminal court after issuing a complaint to the MNHRC regarding the death of his daughter at the hands of the Myanmar Army, showed how the NHRI was incapable of preventing the intimidation of human rights defenders and the inability to hold the military accountable.
A similar theme of military impunity was found in the case of Ko Par Gyi, in which a military tribunal privately acquitted two soldiers who killed the journalist in military custody against recommendations made by the MNHRC that the case be handled in a public court of law. The report of the MNRHC investigation itself was full of inconsistencies and did not address the signs of torture on the body of the murdered journalist.
Inaction is another stain on the legitimacy of the MNHRC. Currently, political activists continue to remain imprisoned or awaiting trial on baseless charges and peaceful activists continue to be met with ruthless force and arbitrary arrest for merely criticizing the actions of the Myanmar Government. The Myanmar Army continues to commit systematic and widespread human rights abuses such as extrajudicial killing, sexual violence, torture, and forced labor in conflict and non-conflict areas. In other parts of Myanmar, ethnic minorities are being confined to camps and face systematic discrimination abuse from the highest levels of Government and society. Throughout all of this, the MNHRC has remained shockingly quiet – only conducting human rights investigations when the political risk is non-existent.
For the MNHRC to be effective, it must demonstrate a commitment to the international standards set forth in the Paris Principles. This includes constructing a meaningful and recurring dialogue with civil society, abolishing the influence of the President and the Myanmar Army, and advocating for the protection of human rights defenders. The international community must also seek to pressure the Myanmar Government into creating an NHRI that is truly in line with the Paris Principles and that has proven its dedication to the promotion and protection of human rights.
Reports by Civil Society Organizations
Recommendations on Reform of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Law ( 3 August 2019)
‘Return to Sender:’ MNHRC Enabling Law Must be Returned to Parliament for Structural Reform ( 9 October 2018)
2017 ANNI Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia ( 5 December 2017)
2015 ANNI Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia ( 18 September 2015)
2014 ANNI Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia (2 September 2014)
2013 ANNI Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia ( 30 September 2013)
2012 ANNI Report on the Performance and Establishment of National Human Rights Institutions in Asia ( 8 November 2012)
Statements and Other Activities by Civil Society Organizations concerning Myanmar National Human Rights Commission
MNHRC Must Take Stand on Extrajudicial Killings of Rakhine Villagers (14 May 2019)
ရခိုင္ရြာသားမ်ား ဥပေဒမဲ့သတ္ျဖတ္ခံရျခင္းႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ MNHRC မွ မွန္ကန္သည့္ ရပ္တည္ခ်က္ျပရန္လုိ (14 May 2019)
Interview: လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး သူတို႔အျမင္ (31 July 2019)
လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒျပင္ေရး လႊတ္ေတာ္ေကာ္မတီေတြနဲ႔ ေဆြးေႏြး (5 August 2019)
Reports by International Coordinating Committee Sub-Committee on Accreditation (SCA)
Important Documents by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission
Strategic Plan 2020 – 2024 (Consultation Draft) (15 July 2019)
Statements by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission
Statements in 2019
မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ အမျိုးသား လူ့အခွင့်အရေး ကော်မရှင် သတင်းထုတ်ပြန်ချက်အမှတ် (၂ /၂၀၁၉) (3 May 2019)
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အမွတ္စဥ္ (၄/၂၀၁၉) (14 June 2019)
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အမွတ္စဥ္ (၂/၂၀၁၉) (3 May 2019)
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အမွတ္စဥ္ (၁/၂၀၁၉) (6 January 2019)
Statements in 2018
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အမွတ္စဥ္ (၁၂/၂၀၁၈) (22 December 2018)
Statement of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission with regard to the by-election of 2018 (Statement No. 10 /2018) (4 November 2018)
၂၀၁၈ ခုႏွစ္ ၾကားျဖတ္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္း၍ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ အမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္၏ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အမွတ္စဥ္ (၉/၂၀၁၈) (4 November 2018)
ရိုက္တာသတင္းေထာက္ ကိုဝလံုးႏွင့္ ကိုေက်ာ္စိုးဦးတို႔အား ျပစ္ဒဏ္ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့ျခင္းႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္းသည့္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အမွတ္စဥ္ (၉/၂၀၁၈) (4 September 2018)
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အမွတ္စဥ္ (၇/၂၀၁၈) (11 September 2018)
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္လရွင္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ (၆/၂၀၁၈) (11 September 2018)
Statement on the sentencing of journalists Ko Wa Lone and Ko Kyaw Soe Oo of Reuters News Agency Statement No. (9/2018) (4 September 2018)
Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Statement No.( 7 /2018) (26 June 2018)
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္အမွတ္ (၅၊ ၂၀၁၈) (19 April 2018)
သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ အမွတ္စဥ္ ( ၃ / ၂၀၁၈) သက္ငယ္မုဒိမ္းက်ဴးလြန္သူမ်ားအား အျမန္ဆံုးေဖာ္ထုတ္အေရးယူႏုိင္ေရးႏွင့္ ထိေရာက္ေသာ ျပစ္ဒဏ္မ်ားခ်မွတ္ႏုိင္ေရး သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 19 February 2018)
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္ (၅ /ကာကြယ္ / ၂၀၁၈) ( 19 February)
Statement No. (1/2018) Statement by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission ( 9 January 2018)
သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ အမွတ္စဥ္ ( ၁ / ၂၀၁၈ ) ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 9 January 2018)
Statements in 2017
Statement by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission on the arrest of two journalists ( 21 December 2017)
သတင္းမီဒီယာသမား ႏွစ္ဦးဖမ္းဆီးခံရျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္၏ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 21 December 2017)
Myanmar National Human Rights Commission on the Occasion of the International Human Rights Day ( 10 December 2017 )
၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္၊ ဒီဇင္ဘာလ ၁၀ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ က်ေရာက္ေသာ အျပည္ျပည္ဆုိင္ရာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေန႔ အထိမ္းအမွတ္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္၏ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 10 December 2017)
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ သတင္းမီဒီယာသမား ၃ ဦးအား အမႈေက်ေအးေပးလုိက္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 1 September 2017)
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 26 August 2017)
သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ အမွတ္စဥ္ (၄ / ၂၀၁၇) ဒုတိယအႀကိမ္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးညီလာခံ – (၂၁) ရာစုပင္လုံအား ႀကိဳဆုိေထာက္ခံေၾကာင္း သေဘာထားထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( ၂၄ February 2017)
Statements in 2016
Statement No (15/2016) Statement by Myanmar National Human Rights Commission on the occasion of the International Human Rights Day which falls on the 10th of December 2016 ( 10 December 2016)
Statement No (14/2016) ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာင္မရွင္ ျမင္းျခံအက်ဥ္းေထာင္တြင္ ကြင္းဆင္းစုံစမ္း စစ္ေဆးေတြ႔ရွိခ်က္ႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္း၍ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ (19 October 2016)
Statement No (12/2016) စစ္ကုိင္းတုိင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ေရႊဘုိၿမိဳ႔နယ္အတြင္းရွိ ေရႊဘုိအက်ဥ္းေထာင္ကုိ ၾကည့္ရႈစစ္ေဆးျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ေသာ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 30 August 2016)
Statement No (11/2016) Statement of welcome on the 21st Century Panglong Peace Conference Myanmar National Human Rights Commission ( 26 August 2016)
Statement No (11/2016) ျပည္ေထာင္စု ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ညီလာခံ (၂၁) ရာစု ပင္လုံကုိ ႀကိဳဆုိေထာက္ခံျခင္း ( 26 August 2016)
Statement No (10/2016) စစ္ကိုင္းတုိင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ကသာၿမိဳ႔နယ္အတြင္းရွိ ကသာအက်ဥ္းေထာင္ကုိ ၾကည့္ရႈစစ္ေဆးျခင္းႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ေသာ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 19 August 2016)
Statement No. (4/2016) ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္၏သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္ ( 8 April 2016)
Statement No.(2/2016) Statement Regarding the Visit to the Prison, Police lock-up and District Hospital Guard ward in Hkamti township, Sagaing Region (29 February 2016)
Statement No.(1/2016) Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Press Statement Regarding Squatter (3 February 2016)
Statements in 2015
Statement No.(16/2015) Statement by Myanmar National Human Rights Commission on the occasion of the International Human Rights Day which falls on 10 December 2015 (10 December 2015)
Myanmar Rights Commission Calls For Political Prisoner Amnesty Before Elections ( 28 October 2015)
Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Statement No.(15/2015) ( 27 October 2015)
Statement No (14/2015) Statement regarding the visit to the Prison and Police Lockup of Kaw Thaung Township and Myeik Township Situated in Tanintharyi Region (19 October 2015)
Statement No. (12/2015) Statement with regards to the apprehension and detention of the demonstrators protesting for the reform of National Education Law at Latpadan on 10 March 2015 ( 11 September 2015)
Statement No.(11/2015) Statement regarding the Application of bail for the (4)Student Demonstrators of Yadanarpon University, Mandalay Region to Appear for the Examination Statement ( 11 September 2015)
Statement No. (10/2015) Statement of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission ( 30 July 2015)
Statement No. (8/2015) Visit to Mandalay, Naung Cho, Thi Paw and Lashio Township Prisons and Work Stations ( 7 July 2015)
Statement No. (7/2015) The Visit to Maing-Sat Prison in Shan State ( 20 May 2015)
Statement No. (6/2015) The case Involving the Death of Ko Aung Naing (a) Ko Aung Kyaw Naing (a) Ko Par Gyi ( 8 May 2015)
Outcome Statement of senior officials Workshop on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and Related Resolution ( 29 April 2015)
Statement No. (4/2015) Agreement by the Two Sides on the Draft Text on Nationwide Ceasefire ( 1 April 2015)
Statement No. (3/2015) The Visit to Insein Central Prison ( 3 March 2015)
Statement No.(2/2015) The Armed Conflict in Laukkai Area ( 27 February 2015)
Statement No. (1/2015) On the Inquiry of Riots of 22nd December 2014 at Latpadaungtaung Copper Mine Project in Salingyi Township ( 14 January 2015)
Statements in 2014
Statement On the International Human Rights Day ( 10 December 2014)
Statement No. (2/2014) Investigation of the Incident at the Ducheeratan Village ( 17 February 2014)
Statement No. (1/2014) On the Presidential Order of Pardon ( 3 January 2014)
Statements in 2013
Statement No. (4/2013) On the International Human Rights Day ( 10 December 2013)
Myanmar National Human Rights Commission Acceptance of Complaints (26 September 2013)
Statement No. (3/2013) Concerning Violence That Had Occurred in Rakhine State (7 May 2013)
Statement No. (2/2013) Regarding the Conflict in Kachin State (28 March 2013)
Statement No. (1/2013) on Humanitarian Assistance for the Conflict Victims of the Kachin State (18 January 2013)
Statements in 2012
Statement (8/2012) on the International Human Rights Day (10 December 2012)
Statement Concerning Its Membership in South East Asia NHRIs Forum (SEANF) No. 6/2012 (17 September 2012)
Statement on Its Trip to the Kachin State (5/2012) (14 August 2012)
Statement No. (4/2012) Concerning Incidents in Rakhine State in June 2012 (11 July 2012)
Statement on the Plan of Action for Prevention Against Recruitment of the Under-Aged Children for Military Service (2 July 2012)
Statement on Its Establishment and Its Current Status of Functioning (27 March 2012)
Statement by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (14 January 2012)
Statements in 2011
Statement on its visits to the Insein Prison and Hlay-Hlaw-Inn Yebet Prison Labour Camp (30 December 2011)
Statement on its visit to Kachin State (13 December 2011)
Statement on International Human Rights Day (10 December 2011)
Statement by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (27 November 2011)
Open Letter to President Thein Sein (12 November 2011)
Open Letter to President Thein Sein (10 October 2011)
Myanmar National Human Rights Commission – Accepting of Complaint (6 October 2011)
Reports By Myanmar National Human Rights Commission
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ ၂၀၁၇ ခုႏွစ္အစီရင္ခံစာ (28 May 2018)
ကမၻာ့လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္း (ျမန္မာဘာသာမွ ရွမ္းဘာသာ) (31 January 2017)
ကမၻာ့လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္း (ျမန္မာဘာသာမွ မြန္ဘာသာ) (31 January 2017)
ကမၻာ့လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္း (ျမန္မာဘာသာမွ ပုိး- အေနာက္ ကရင္ဘာသာ) (31 January 2017)
ကမၻာ့လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္း (ျမန္မာဘာသာမွ စေကာ ကရင္ဘာသာ) (31 January 2017)
ကမၻာ့လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္း (ျမန္မာဘာသာမွ ပုိး-အေရွ႔ ကရင္ဘာသာ)( 30 January 2017)
ကမၻာ့လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေၾကညာစာတမ္း (ကခ်င္ဘာသာ) (30 January 2017)
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ိဳးသားလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒဆုိင္ရာ လုပ္ထုံးလုပ္နည္းမ်ား (24 October 2016)
ေငြေၾကးဆုိင္ရာ လုပ္ထုံးလုပ္နည္းမ်ား ( 24 October 2016)
၀န္ထမ္းေရးရာကိစၥမ်ားႏွင့္ စပ္လ်ဥ္းသည့္ လုပ္ထုံးလုပ္နည္းမ်ား ( 24 October 2016)
၂၀၁၅ ခုႏွစ္ ႏွစ္ပတ္လည္ အစီရင္ခံစာ ( 12 August 2016)
Strategic Plan ( 16 November 2015)
၂၀၁၄ ခုႏွစ္ ႏွစ္ပတ္လည္ အစီရင္ခံစာ ( 07 September 2015)
Universal Declaration of Human Rights text from English to Myanmar ( 19 June 2013)
Activities of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (5 September 2011 to 31 January 2012) (31 January 2012)