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Who we are

Founding members of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar.

Yanghee Lee

Former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar

Marzuki Darusman

Former Chair of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar

Chris Sidoti

Former Member of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar

Yanghee Lee

Yanghee Lee is an international human rights expert and founding member of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar. Yanghee is a former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, having held the mandate from 2014 to 2020. During this time, she observed the 2015 general elections and monitored the situation throughout the National League for Democracy's first term in government. She reported on the military's deadly offensives against Myanmar's ethnic and religious minorities, including the genocidal atrocities committed against the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017. In her final report in 2020, she warned that the hard-fought democratic space in Myanmar was under threat and called for a national dialogue to bring the nation together. Yanghee has spent much of her career specialising in child psychology and was a practicing developmental psychologist in her native South Korea where, until recently, she was a psychology professor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Yanghee served as chairperson on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child from 2007 to 2011, and on the Meeting of Chairpersons of Human Rights Treaty Bodies from 2010 to 2011. In 2011 Yanghee founded the International Child Rights Center, a non-profit with the mission of promoting and protecting the human rights of children.

Marzuki Darusman

Marzuki Darusman is an international human rights expert and founding member of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar. Marzuki is former Chair of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar. In 2018, after a 15-month examination of the Myanmar military's violations in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan states, the Fact-Finding Mission released its full account and called for the investigation and prosecution of Senior General Min-Aung Hlaing, and his top military leaders for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. In 2019 the Fact-Finding mission produced two further in-depth reports. The first exposed the extent to which the Myanmar military uses its own business, foreign companies and arms deals to support brutal operations against ethnic minorities. It called for immediate targeted sanctions and arms embargoes. The second report found the military systematically and routinely uses sexual and gender-based violence to terrorise and punish ethnic minorities and called for justice. Marzuki has been a prominent human rights defender and campaigner in Indonesia for more than four decades. Marzuki served as a Member of the House of Representatives in Indonesian Parliament from 1978 until 1999, when he was appointed to the office of Attorney General. In 2010 Marzuki became the founding director of Human Rights Resource Centre for ASEAN, a think tank at the University of Indonesia. That same year he was appointed chairperson of the Report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka, investigating human rights violations during the Sri Lankan civil war, and a member of the UN Commission of Inquiry to investigate the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Marzuki is the former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in North Korea, holding the mandate from 2010 to 2016.

Chris Sidoti

Chris Sidoti is an international human rights expert and founding member of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar. Along with Marzuki Darusman, he was also a member of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, which released three reports across 2018 and 2019 exposing widespread human rights violations including systematic gender-based and sexual violence by the Myanmar military against ethnic minorities, and the military's business interests. From 1999 to 2013 Chris led a human rights initiative between Australia and Myanmar. Chris has held a number of prominent public offices in his native Australia in the field of human rights including Australian Human Rights Commissioner from 1995 to 2000, Australian Law Reform Commissioner from 1992 to 1995, and Founding Director of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission from 1987 to 1992. Chris is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Sydney, Griffith University (Queensland), University of the Sunshine Coast (Queensland) and the Australian Catholic University. In the international arena, Chris has held roles at non-governmental organisations including director of the Geneva-based International Service for Human Rights from 2004 to 2007 and chair of the Northern Ireland Bill of Rights Forum in 2007.

Special Advisory Council for Myanmar

We are an independent group of international experts working to support the peoples of Myanmar in their fight for human rights, peace, democracy, justice and accountability.

Quotes

မင်းအောင်လှိုင်၏ စစ်တပ်သည် ရိုဟင်ဂျာများအပေါ် လူမျိုးသုဥ်းသတ်ဖြတ်၊ ရက်စက်ယုတ်မာမှုများ ကျူးလွန်စဉ် အသုံးပြုခဲ့သော နည်းလမ်းများကို ယခုလည်းအသုံးပြုလျက်ရှိပါတယ်။ လတ်တလော အစုလိုက်အပြုံလိုက် သတ်ဖြတ်ခံရမှု၏ ရုပ်ပုံများကို ၂၀၁၇ ခုနှစ် ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်မြောက်ပိုင်းရှိ ပုံရိပ်များနှင့် နှိုင်းယှဉ်ကြည့်ပါက မည်သည့် ကွာခြားချက်မျှ တွေ့မည်မဟုတ်။ ထိုဆိုးရွားလှသော ရာဇဝတ်မှုများအတွက် မည်သူကမှ တရားစီရင်ခြင်းမခံရသေးသည့်အပြင် ယခုတွင်လည်း ပြည်သူများ အစုလိုက်အပြုံလိုက် သတ်ဖြတ်ခံရခြင်းနှင့် ကျေးရွာများ မီးရှို့ခံရခြင်းများ နိုင်ငံတလွှား ဆက်လက်ဖြစ်ပွားလျက်ရှိနေပါတယ်။

- Yanghee Lee

Min Aung Hlaing' s forces are using the same tactics they used during the genocidal atrocities committed against the Rohingya. If you juxtapose the pictures of recent massacres with those of 2017 in northern Rakhine, you cannot see any difference. No one has been held to account for those terrible crimes, and now people are being massacred and villages burned up and down the country.

- Yanghee Lee

နိုင်ငံလုံးဆိုင်ရာ လူထုအုံကြွမှု ဟာ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ၏ ရှေးရှုရာ ဦးတည်လမ်းကြောင်းကို အခရာကျစွာ ပြောင်းလဲစေနေပါတယ်။ ရှေ့တွင် ရင်ဆိုင်ရမည့် စိန်ခေါ်မှုများစွာရှိနေပေသေးသည်။ အာဆီယံ၊ ကုလသမဂ္ဂနှင့် နိုင်ငံတကာ အသိုက်အဝိုင်းတခုလုံးအနေနှင့် ဒီစိန်ခေါ်မှုများစွာကို မြန်မာလူထုများသာ ဆက်လက်ရင်ဆိုင်စေခိုင်း၍ မရနိုင်တော့။ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံကို အတိဒုက္ခရောက်စေသော အဓိကတာ၀န်ရှိသည့် လက်သည်များအား တရားစီရင်ရေးလုပ်ငန်းစဥ်များမှတစ်ဆင့် အပြီးအပြတ် တာ၀န်ခံစေရန် သေချာစေခြင်းသည် မြန်မာ့ ဒီမိုကရေစီအနာဂတ်အတွက် နိုင်ငံတကာ အသိုက်အဝန်း၏ အရေးပါဆုံး ပံ့ပိုးကူညီမှု ဖြစ်နိုင်တယ်။

- Marzuki Darusman

The people's national uprising is fundamentally changing the course of the Myanmar nation. There are many challenges ahead. ASEAN, the United Nations, the international community at large, cannot continue to leave the Myanmar people to face these challenges alone. Ensuring that the primary architects of Myanmar's suffering are finally brought to justice could be the single most significant contribution that the international community makes to Myanmar's democratic future.

- Marzuki Darusman

ကုလသမဂ္ဂ လုံခြုံရေးကောင်စီက မြန်မာနိုင်ငံရှိ အခြေအနေကို နိုင်ငံတကာ ရာဇဝတ်ခုံရုံး (ICC) သို့ လွှဲပြောင်းပေးခဲ့သင့်တာ ကာလအတန်ကြာကတည်းက ဖြစ်တယ်။ ၎င်းအနေနဲ့ လုပ်နိုင်စွမ်းမရှိ ဒါမှမဟုတ်၊ လုပ်လိုစိတ်မရှိပါက၊ အခြားသူများက အပြီးအပြတ်အနေနဲ့ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံတွင် ကြီးလေးသော နိုင်ငံတကာရာဇဝတ်မှု ကျူးလွန်သူများအား ICC သို့မဟုတ် အထူးခုံရုံးတရပ်မှတဆင့် တရားမျှတမှုရှိစေရန်အလို့ငှာ ဆောင်ကြဉ်းသင့်တယ်။

- Chris Sidoti

The UN Security Council should have referred the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court (ICC) long ago. If it can't, or won't, then others must act to finally bring the perpetrators of grave international crimes in Myanmar to justice through the ICC or a special tribunal.

- Chris Sidoti

မိမိတို့အနေနှင့် လူသားချင်းစာနာထောက်ထားမှုဆိုင်ရာ အကူအညီပေးမှု စိတ်ဓာတ်အလျှောက် ကမ္ဘာကြီးကို ဆောင်ရွက်ပေးစေလိုပါသည်။ မိမိတို့၏ လိုအပ်သောထောက်ပံ့ရေးပစ္စည်းများ ဖျက်ဆီးခံရပြီး ကုန်ခမ်းလုနီးပါးဖြစ်နေသည်မှာ လေးလရှိပြီဖြစ်သည်။ မိမိတို့ ရွေးချယ်စရာ နှစ်လမ်းပဲရှိတော့သည်။ ကျွန်ုပ်တို့ ငတ်မွတ်၍သေခြင်း ဒါမှမဟုတ် တိုက်ပွဲ၀င်၍သေခြင်း ဟူ၍သာရှိတော့သည်။

- Secretary-1 of Mindat People's Administration, Chin State

We want the world to act within the spirit of humanitarian assistance. For four months we've had our supplies destroyed, we're running out. We will either die of starvation or die fighting. Those are our two choices.

- Secretary-1 of Mindat People's Administration, Chin State