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Myanmar

US names Burma among the world's worst human rights violators

Mungpi

The United States State Department slammed the Burmese military for their use of child soldiers, torture and forced relocation yesterday in a report on human rights around in the world in 2005.

Burma was named in the report as one of the world's worst violators of human rights.

"In Burma where a junta rules by diktat, promises of democratic reform and respect for human rights continued to serve as a facade for brutality and repression," the report said.

Among a variety of issues including forced labour, the use of rape as a weapon of war and religious discrimination, the report also highlighted the ongoing detention of political activists including Aung San Suu Kyi.

"The regime maintained iron-fisted control through the surveillance, harassment, and imprisonment of political activists, including Nobel Laureate and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who remained under house arrest without charge," the report said.

Aung Myo Min, director of the Thai-based Human Rights Education Institution of Burma told Mizzima he welcomed the report.

"There is no improvement at all in the situation of human rights [in Burma].... [the junta] continued to arrest and detain political activists... and use children as child soldiers. So, we can say that the human rights situation of Burma is not improving but backsliding," Aung Myo Min said.

The State Department report, which detailed the human rights conditions in 196 countries, also targeted North Korea, Iran, Iraq and China as having poor rights records.

"Countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers tend to be the world's most systematic human rights violators," said the report.