Myanmar: A human rights defender targeted

An Open Letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC)
Navi Pillay
High Commissioner for Human Rights

Dear Ms. Pillay
Myanmar: A human rights defender targeted by medical doctors

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received a copy of a letter from a human rights defender in Myanmar (Burma), a copy of which has also been addressed to you. As the letter may not have been received or its contents not communicated to you, we are taking this opportunity to raise the matter it contains with you directly, and also to discuss with you what can be done through international interventions into this type of situation.

The letter is dated 23 March 2010. It is from Ma Sandar, and her husband, Zaw Min Htun, and is addressed to Senior General Than Shwe, chairman of the State Peace and Development Council; U Aung Toe, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Myanmar; and, the minister for health, with copies to other senior officials in Myanmar, our office, and to you.

Ma Sandar, by way of background, was imprisoned from August 2008 to September 2009 because she made a complaint of corruption against authorities in Twante Township, Yangon, where she and her husband reside. She was released on completing her sentence. Less than two months later, she was subjected, together with her husband, to new fabricated criminal charges. It is that case, about which the AHRC has already issued an urgent appeal (AHRC-UAU-007-2010), which is the subject of the letter. The contents, in brief, are as follows:

1. On 12 November 2009 as a result of a vehicle accident a young woman named Ma La Yeit Choe (alias Ma Thida Win) went to the Twente Township Hospital to obtain a medical certificate for an injury. At that time there was no doctor present. She waited for two hours before Dr. Daw Hsint Hsint Thi attended to her. The doctor said that she had to do an x-ray. But because there was no electricity supply, they would have to use a generator. The cost of using the generator would be 10,000 Kyat and for medicine, 6000 Kyat; in total about USD16. The doctor said that if the accident victim and family would not pay, they could seek treatment elsewhere, and thereafter allegedly rudely ejected them from the premises.

2. As the township hospital is a public service, the family was unhappy with how they were treated and went to lodge a complaint at the local police station, which was recorded by Sub-inspector Hlaing Lin Htun, and in which they said that the doctor had failed to perform her duties. They went to the general hospital for treatment.

3. According to the doctor, when Ma Sandar and her husband went to see the accident victim at the hospital, they abused her and threatened her and her staff. The township health department head, Dr. U Kyu Khaing, opened a criminal case against Ma Sandar and Zaw Min Htun (Penal Code, sections 353/506; obscenity and criminal intimidation, each punishable with up to two years' imprisonment). Ma Sandar and her husband emphatically deny the charges.

4. Although the case is a minor one, it has since been investigated by high-ranked council officials, the Bureau of Special Investigation--which is supposed to be concerned with cases of corruption, not ordinary criminal inquiries--and the Criminal Investigation Department, which also is designated for serious crimes. Despite a lack of prima facie evidence with which to open a case, Township Judge U Aye Ko Ko has allowed the matter to go to trial.

>From the experience of the AHRC, and from our knowledge of the previous case in which Ma Sandar was entangled, it is obvious that this trial also is being arranged to secure a conviction against this human rights defender and again unjustly imprison her.

That said, the letter points to a couple of serious difficulties for us in addressing the human rights situation in Myanmar, and in other countries with similar conditions.

The first serious difficulty is one of understanding. Often, cases concerning human rights defenders are described as arising from dramatic events like protest actions or high-profile political moments. But this case shows how the authorities in Myanmar can make something out of anything. Even the most trivial occurrence, an argument over treatment for a small injury at a hospital, is an excuse and an opportunity for them to get back at a perceived troublemaker.

The same difficulty is evident from the persons involved in this case. When we think about circumstances where human rights defenders are targeted, the perpetrators who come to mind are soldiers, police, mafia figures, or others acting on behalf of people like these. But in Myanmar where five decades of military dictatorship have poisoned all institutions and social life, they are just as likely to be medical doctors or other professionals acting as proxies for state authorities.

With the emergence of a new parliament under military control in the next year or so, this aspect of human rights abuse, and attacks on human rights defenders in Myanmar, is likely to become more pronounced, making understanding of the real actors and issues even more difficult for people outside the country than it already is. But this difficulty at least is surmountable, with close attention to what is happening and communication with human rights defenders there.

The second difficulty is what to do. Of course, we can bring as much pressure to bear on the authorities in Myanmar from outside as possible. Experience has shown that concerted efforts from United Nations agencies, governments abroad, human rights groups, the media and others can have an effect in some instances. Indeed, in this case it is obviously the hope of Ma Sandar and her husband, in sending a copy of their letter to you, that you or your staff take up the case with the Government of Myanmar in the hope that pressure from your office may have some effect. We share this hope and look forward to your intervention.

But no matter the amount of pressure, systemic obstacles remain. Among these, one of the most pronounced in Myanmar is the executive-controlled judiciary. In fact, from the AHRC's study over some years, we can safely say that there is no judiciary in Myanmar at all, although there are persons called judges and buildings called courts. Neither these persons nor their institutions function in any way like a judiciary, either in terms of international standards or even in terms of the domestic law.

Under these circumstances, it is pointless to make statements calling for a trial to be fair or for an independent inquiry into some violation of rights, because no institutions exist for these things to happen. That there is no prospect of fair inquiry or trial in this case and hundreds of others like it that the AHRC has studied is obvious from the letter itself. The accused have been forced to appeal to the top army officer in the country, as head of the ruling council, for some sort of relief. There is nowhere else for them to go.

In this way, requests for redress of wrongs committed are reduced to feudalism, where citizens who should have rights as human beings are obliged to supplicate some high up person to beg for mercy. The sad fact is that in the 21st-century, conditions for victims of rights abuse in Myanmar are little different than they were three or four hundred years ago. The availability of computers and email notwithstanding, profound inequality between rulers and ruled underpins all relations and transactions between state and society.

In closing, the Asian Human Rights Commission is raising the case of Ma Sandar and her husband with you in order to ensure that you are apprised of its details, to invite you to intervene so that the needless prosecution of this human rights defender might be brought to a halt and her second imprisonment averted, but also to call for a more honest dialogue about the real situation of human rights in Myanmar, and in Asia, so that we can come up with meaningful strategies to address not only the incidence of human rights abuse on a case by case basis but also so as to go deeply into the institutional arrangements that enable it.

Yours sincerely

Basil Fernando
Executive Director
Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong

(Copy of original letter from Ma Sandar and Zaw Min Htun attached)

Cc:
1. Tomas Ojea Quintana, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar
2. Gabriela Carina Knaul de Albuquerque e Silva, UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers
3. Margaret Sekaggya, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders
4. Homayoun Alizadeh, Regional Representative, OHCHR, Bangkok, Thailand

ENDS

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