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Sweden Should Impose Sanctions on the Burmese Military

Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrate daily against the military junta in Burma (also known as Myanmar). Many Burmese people have expressed their opposition to the military's takeover of the democratically elected government – but they need the…
Mandalay University graduates bow their heads as they hold posters of Mya Thwet Thwet Khine, a 19-year-old woman fatally shot by police on February 9 in Naypyidaw, during an anti-coup protest in Mandalay, Myanmar, February 14, 2021. 
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China’s Bride Trafficking Problem

China has a bride trafficking problem. The country’s longstanding one-child policy and preference for boys created a huge gender imbalance. The difficulty many Chinese men now face finding wives, combined with a lack of protections in China, is…
“I do not know exactly or remember how I got into the new house…When I woke up, I saw a man but not my friends anymore. I don’t know exactly, but later I guessed that was a Chinese house. I did not know where to run away…I realized that I was trafficked.
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It’s a Booming Business: Trafficking Myanmar ‘Brides’ to China

Nang Seng Ja was just 19 and living in Myanmar’s northern Kachin State when her aunt invited her on a trip to see her three cousins who live in China. About a month into the visit, Nang Seng Ja fainted. She awakened in a strange house surrounded…
“Then the Chinese man said, ‘If you do not marry a man, the money we spent on you to bring you here…was 3000 Yuan and as you have already stayed here for 10 days, 4000 Yuan [US$637] is needed to give me back now. Right now, count the money to give me.
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Combating Sexual Harassment in the Garment Industry

  Sexual Harassment in Garment Factories Eleven women garment workers from a factory in southern India sent a hand-written letter to a local union in late 2016.[1] They wrote: “The plight of women workers … we don’t have anyone who would…
Women Garment Industry
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The Crushing of the Free Press in Myanmar

Rarely does an event more clearly embody a country’s human-rights decline than the Myanmar court’s sentencing of two Reuters journalists to seven years in prison for allegedly violating a colonial-era law on protecting state secrets.…
Kyaw Soe Oo carries his daughter while escorted by police outside a court in Yangon, Myanmar, June 18, 2018.
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When Will Britain Step Up on Burma?

Over the last nine months some 700,000 ethnic Rohingya in Burma have been driven from their homes across the border into Bangladesh by the Burmese military. The attacks have been described by the UN as “a textbook case of ethnic…
Rohingya refugees cross the Naf River with an improvised raft to reach to Bangladesh in Teknaf, Bangladesh, November 12, 2017. Picture taken November 12, 2017. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain TO FIND ALL PICTURES SEARCH REUTERS PULITZER
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Cambodia’s Imaginary Enemies

Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings has a real-world equivalent in Cambodia. Call it the Book of Imaginary Enemies. This imagined book would tell tales of government attacks against rights activists, journalists and other peaceful critics…
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Tackling Sexual Harassment in the Garment Industry

“Whore.... Do you think this is a brothel? You must meet the production demand here. If you want to continue to work here, listen to us.” This nasty threat is a snapshot of the harassment that supervisors and managers heap on many Bangladeshi…
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Japan Should Help Rohingya Rape Survivors

To call Yasmina, age 15, a survivor is an understatement. Burmese soldiers shot and slashed   her family members to death as they fled their village in late August. Yasmina (name changed) managed to escape and swim across a river to the…
Rohingya women refugees who crossed the Naf River from Burma into Bangladesh continue inland toward refugee camps.
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The Burmese Military is Committing Crimes Against Humanity

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh – In Bangladesh’s overflowing and squalid camps for the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing the Burmese army’s campaign of ethnic cleansing, I met three remarkable women who told me their stories of horror and survival in the…
201709asia_burma_Rashida
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The Cambodia Conundrum: What Is Wrong With Hun Sen?

What’s wrong with the prime minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen? He seems to be in a foul mood lately. His Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which has run Cambodia for nearly four decades, has embarked on a new campaign against the political…
Prime Minister Hun Sen attends a campaign rally in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, June 2, 2017.
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Stop Using Criminal Laws to Quash Peaceful Speech

When a group of high school and university students staged a play at a peace conference in Burma early this January, they never imagined that they would end up in prison. The play, performed at a gathering of civil society…
Poet Maung Saung Kha served six months in prison for posting a poem online. He was released in May 2016.
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UK must keep up pressure on Burma over rapes of women and girls

In late December, two young women fled Burma's Rakhine State for Bangladesh, making a gruelling journey by foot, a smuggler's rickety boat, and rickshaw into an uncertain future. The women, from Burma's long-persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority, had fled…
A Rohingya Muslim woman walks at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on February 4, 2017.
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The Secret Underbelly of the Cambodian Garment Industry

“That’s the Rat Trap Door factory,” a garment worker told me, pointing to a little blue door on a windowless wall along National Road 4 in Phnom Penh. “The door is so small it looks like only rats can get in.” It didn’…
Women in the sewing division of a factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Women constitute about 90 percent of the workforce in Cambodia’s garment industry.
News

No More Tea Breaks

The Crucial Role of Women in Burma’s Peace Talks

“Women’s role is to ease tensions,” a public relations expert of an ethnic armed group told me as I sat in his office in northern Burma (also called Myanmar). He and his male colleagues were trying to explain why women could not be part of cease-fire…
Residents of Ngot Ngar village, Kutkai township, Shan State, in front of their homes, which have come under attack from the Burmese military.
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“A Gentleman’s Agreement”

Women’s Participation in Burma’s Peace Negotiations and Political Transition

In theory, we can do it [increase women’s participation in the peace talks]. But in practice it’s difficult. So, we made a “gentleman’s agreement” to wait until later. —Ethnic Armed Organization representative,…
Members of parliament attend a meeting at Burma’s lower house in the capital, Naypyitaw, March 2016.
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In Flawed Union Law, Hope Remains for Greater Transparency

May Day was celebrated in Cambodia with rallies and calls for better working conditions, but there was not much to celebrate. In April, Cambodia’s National Assembly passed a trade union law that falls well short of the International Labor…
Cambodia
News

This is How Women are Exploited in Today’s Global Workforce

“It doesn’t matter whether you are pregnant or not – whether you are sick or not – you have to sit and work,” Po Pov told my colleague about her job in a Cambodian garment factory. “If you take a break, the work piles up on the machine and the…
An activist from the Worker Information Center, a local nongovernmental organization, sporting a t-shirt as part of a campaign to raise awareness about garment workers’ wages in Cambodia.

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