Rights groups condemn Burma's electoral laws
Updated
A senior United Nations official has called for Burma's military to be investigated over allegations of human rights crimes and war crimes against civilians. The UN's special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, Tomas Quintana made the recommendation to the UN Human Rights Council.The report puts added pressure on Burma's military regime ahead of upcoming national elections. No date has been set but the junta this week announced new electoral laws, which have been denounced by international observers as unfair and undemocratic. The new laws prevent opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's two thousand political prisoners from running.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speakers: Benjamin Zawacki, Burma spokesman for Amnesty International
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ZAWACKI: In truth these laws effectively throw salt into the wounds if you will of these political prisoners. These people should never have been detained in the first place and yet what we're seeing is that not only do they face no reasonable prospect of being released immediately and unconditionally, which is what Amnesty International has been calling for for some time, but in fact now they can't even be considered members of a political party. So this is much more draconian than we thought.
LAM: So the election date of course has not been set, but do you think this new law will make a mockery of the entire process?
ZAWACKI: Well the prospects for a bonafide legitimate election weren't looking to be the case anyway, and now with this election law it's very, very difficult to foresee an election to be considered legitimate by any stretch when you essentially have the known political opposition locked up with the key thrown away, and now the rather gratuitous move of saying not only are we not going to release you, but you can't even be part of a political party. Yes, it's very difficult to conceive of an election under these circumstances that can be accepted.
LAM: What about the members of the NLD who are not in jail, might they conceivably take part in the elections and play a meaningful role or do you think that the entire opposition has been hamstrung by this new set of laws?
ZAWACKI: Well the NLD faces a choice, it can either move forward with the elections but by doing so it needs to essentially take Aung San Suu Kyi off of the NLD membership list, because again the law makes clear that if you're serving a sentence, which she is doing, that she cannot part of a political party. And it's very unlikely that that political party, the NLD, will get registered if they refuse to take her off of the membership role. So they're facing the choice of either going forward and contesting the elections without their general secretary Aung San Suu Kyi, or refusing to take her off the membership list but not being registered as a legally official political party. And so I think this law is really designed to split the NLD or at least to confuse them to the point of them becoming ineffectual at election time.
LAM: So do you think the generals have succeeded in paralysing the NLD or do you think there might still be sections of the NLD who might take part?
ZAWACKI: There very well could be sections that take part, but again if we're talking about sections we're talking about less than the whole, and a weak NLD, a split NLD is certainly in the interests of the regime, and that's part and parcel of why this law was passed.
LAM: The United Nations Special Envoy on Human Rights in Burma has recommended a commission of inquiry be set up to see if the generals should be brought to trial at the International Criminal Court for gross human rights abuses. Where do you see this process heading, do you think the UN will pick up on this?
ZAWACKI: Well it's essentially putting the cart before the horse to talk about a referral to the International Criminal Court. What needs to happen first would be a commission of inquiry, which would need to be precede a referral, and that commission would have to be initiated either at the Security Council level or perhaps at the Human Rights Council, but some UN body would have to do that. At the moment the political prospects for that are probably limited, but that's not to say that legally there isn't a justification for it, and it's certainly not to say that in the future it couldn't happen, especially again if these elections turn out to be as illegimate to be it could cause nations to become exercised enough to back this kind of inquiry.
LAM: And just very briefly Benjamin, the generals in Burma have had a long record of ignoring such international pronouncements. What's likely to be different this time?
ZAWACKI: Well unless there's real pressure from countries in the region, China, India and in particular ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, both as individual member states and as a regional bloc, then nothing's going to really affect them. They've proven themselves rather immune to various pressures. But it's the countries in the region that hold the most, that carry the most weight when it comes to the regime.
