The Stateless Rohingya Blog

By David Scott Mathieson Human Rights Watch December 16, 2013 For nearly two decades, Myanmar was a key case study in the growth of the international human rights movement, a country beset by systematic denial of basic freedoms of assembly, association and expression. It stifled a once-assertive media; suffered a brutal, decades-long civil war; and incarcerated thousands of political prisoners. Political and economic reforms since 2011 have done much to improve this dire condition, going even further than some of the government’s critics in the local Myanmar human rights community and international movement could have thought possible. But with these tentative gains come greater challenges to turn promises into reality and address the disastrous effects of 50 years of ruinous military rule. The world marks Human Rights Day on December 10, a reminder that as Myanmar opens up to new internal and external pressures, economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights will take on

At the end of our visit to the camp for internally displaced people, we thanked the women for sharing their stories. But then they said: visitors come, we talk to them, they listen, leave. Nothing changes for us. By Jurate Kazickas Women's eNews December 17, 2013 A female refugee and her child at a displacement camp in Myanmar's Rakhine State. Credit: UN Photo /David Ohana Myanmar's largest city of Yangon, at a conference bringing together women from around the country, women spoke confidently of their vision for a better future and their role in the political process. But only a few hundred miles away, in the state of Rakhine, the second poorest in the country, in a crowded camp for families driven from their villages by ethnic and religious violence, the women feared for their lives and their uncertain future. The situation for these people is so dire that a U.N. official could only say, "Not only is there no light at the end of the tunnel, there is