Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Democratic Voice of Burma

Democratic Voice of Burma

Bullet Points

Posted: 02 Jul 2014 04:37 AM PDT

On today’s edition of Bullet Points:

Police have been lining the streets of Mandalay today after a riot broke out late on Tuesday evening outside a teashop.

Damages worth US$150,000 have been awarded to a Karen girl who was kidnapped in Thailand in 2009.

4,500 people face resettlement as construction continues at the Thilawa Special Economic Zone.

Tesco chairman Sir Richard Broadbent is in Burma meeting Aung San Suu Kyi before a possible launch of a flagship store in the country.

 

Watch Bullet Points on DVB Tv after the 7 o’clock news,

Thai court awards 4.6 million baht in damages for tortured Karen girl

Posted: 02 Jul 2014 03:56 AM PDT

A Thai provincial court has awarded a compensation of 4.6 million baht to a young Karen girl who escaped her Thai employers last year after being subjected to four years of continuous abuse and torture while living under their roof.

The ethnic Karen girl, referred to as "Air", was allegedly kidnapped in 2009 when she was nine years old, and forced to work as a housekeeper for a couple in Kamphaengphet province, in northwestern Thailand. Natee Taeng-on, 35, and his wife, Rattanakorn Piyaworatham, 33, routinely beat and tortured the young girl, until she managed to successfully escape last January when she squeezed underneath a fence while chasing a cat.

According to a press release by the Human Rights and Development Foundation (HRDF), a Bangkok-based rights group providing legal assistance to the now 13-year-old girl, Kamphaengphet provincial court on Monday awarded 4.6 million baht, approximately $142,000, in damages to Air "for inflicting on her cruel treatment and enslavement."

This amount will cover incurred and future medical expenses, as well as damages that the victim has suffered, including "a loss of ability to reproduce" and "a loss of beauty" to the plaintiff.

The couple also face several criminal charges, including causing grievous bodily harm, enslaving a child below the age of 15, and human trafficking.

Summoned by the police in February 2013, they reportedly posted bail at the amount of 700,000 baht, roughly $23,411, and absconded. They are currently still at large.

Preeda Tongchumnum, assistant to HRDF's secretary general, said that HRDF will have to get Air's compensation from the seizing the couple's property.

"The burden is on us to estimate the property of the employers because at the moment, the employers are still at large," Preeda said. "If we have the information to prove that [the property] belongs to them, then we can ask the court to permit us to seize the property so that we can get the money to give to the girl."

According to Air, her employers used to torture her by pouring boiling hot water over her while she was locked in a dog cage. She had tried to escape once and went to police, but the police took her back to her employers. As a punishment, the couple bashed her head against the wall, used a shoe to slap her face and cut off the tip of her ear with scissors, she said. Questions remain as to why the police had initially returned Air to her captors after her first escape.

Related Stories

Dr. Arthi Kruwait, a surgeon at Bangkok's Ramathibodi Hospital who examined Air, testified in court in March about her wounds, mostly sustained by the boiling water inflicted upon her, which were all over her back, arms, legs and chest. The boiling water had also fused her left arm to the side of her body, and required surgery in order to separate them. He also testified that Air suffers from severe mental trauma due to the maltreatment.

Urging the police to find and arrest the couple, Preeda hoped that the severe compensation by the provincial court could serve as a reminder to all Thais that they could face stiff punishment if they were to mistreat their workers.

"This kind of case can be a precedent for lawyers to apply to help other victims," Preeda said. "We can advocate to the public to tell them that employers should respect more of the rights of the employees."

Thailand – host to an estimated three million migrant workers, the majority of whom are Burmese – has been a source of controversy for its treatment of migrant labourers and record of human trafficking.

Last month, the US State Department downgraded the country's ranking in its annual Trafficking in Persons report to the lowest Tier 3 level for showing no discernable improvements in combating the trafficking of workers who face severe abuses in several of the country's industries. The report also criticised the government's inability to harshly prosecute the people involved in trafficking and abusing migrants, especially if they are in the Thai military, navy and government.

 

Police line streets of Mandalay after fresh riots

Posted: 02 Jul 2014 01:39 AM PDT

Police officers are lining the streets of Mandalay after violence between Buddhists and Muslims broke out on Tuesday night.

A group of monks on motorbikes convened with a crowd of marching Buddhists on the corner of 26th and 80th streets in Chan Aye Tharzan Township, Mandalay between 9 and 11pm, in search of a Muslim teashop owner, police said in a press briefing on Wednesday.

The mob surrounded the Sun Teashop, at the corner of 27th and 82nd streets, where they started throwing bricks and stones and smashing windows.

Riot police were called to intervene, and fired rubber bullets into the air at around midnight. Local Buddhist monks arrived on the scene and managed to briefly calm the crowd, but the mob regrouped about half an hour later.

The crowd was finally dispersed at around 3am although groups of people carried on shouting through the night.

At least four people, including one policeman, have been injured.

Several Muslim-owned shops, homes and a mosque were ransacked, and at least three cars were damaged.

Related Stories

The violence kicked off after a blogger, who writes under the name Thit Htoo Lwin, posted an article on 30 June accusing two Muslim owners of the Sun Teashop of raping a Buddhist woman, who he said was their maid.

The story was picked up by several websites, and nationalist monk Wirathu posted it to his Facebook page.

The post has since been removed.

Rumours of the alleged rape spread through social media and was enough to trigger calls to ransack the teashop.

Police have not confirmed whether the two men will be charged for rape in a court of law. Current whereabouts of the accused are unknown.

Tensions between Buddhist and Muslim communities in Mandalay have been high since a rash of ethno-religious violence erupted in mid-2012. The violence spread to Mandalay Division in March 2013, when two days of rioting left more than 40 people dead and about 8,000 displaced.

 

 

Unity Weekly reporters, CEO see final day in court

Posted: 01 Jul 2014 10:11 PM PDT

Defence lawyers for the executive and reporters of the now-shuttered Unity Weekly news journal requested during their final arguments in court on Monday that their clients be charged under the new Media Law instead of being accused of leaking state secrets.

Unity Weekly's reporters – Lu Maw Naing, Sithu Soe, Aung Thura and Yazar Oo — were arrested on 30 and 31 January, along with the news journal's CEO Tint Hsan, for publishing a report about a government facility being constructed in Magwe's Pauk Township by the Burmese military which they alleged was to be a chemical weapons factory. Charged under Article 3 of the Official Secrets Act, the five were accused of revealing state secrets for their report.

Wah Win Maung, the defence lawyer for the Unity employees, said that he argued in court on Monday that the five should be charged under the Media Law instead, which would see them fined instead of imprisoned if they were found guilty.

"We argued that the facility in question was not officially designated for the Unity Weekly to be liable for prosecution under the Article 3(1)a of the Official Secrets law, and that they were only reporting accounts from local villagers in their capacity as a media publication," Wah Win Maung said. "We stated that they should instead be charged with Article 25 of the Media Law."

Article 25 of the Media Law stipulates that news organisations that violate media rules and ethics may face legal action.

However, Zaw Thet Htwe, member of the Interim Press Council, said that while the Media Law has been passed and signed by President Thein Sein and the Union parliament, it has not come into effect as the legislative body has yet to approve any specific clauses or regulations within the Law. These were recently drafted by the Interim Press Council and are currently awaiting approval from the Ministry of Information before being sent to the parliament for discussion.

A day before the final hearing of the Unity Weekly trial, operations at the news journal ceased due to financial problems. Kalyar, an administrative team member, said that the publication was suffering losses because of the trial's legal expenses.

"We told our staff members that we are going out of operation for financial reasons. The trial has been wearing us thin so we had to make this decision," Kalyar said.

Related Stories
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)