What are…Laos’ International Human Rights Obligations & Commitments?

Logo-What isBriefing paper prepared by Civil Rights Defenders (CRD)

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) has participated in the first two rounds of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of its human rights records, but its compliance and engagement with other UN human rights mechanisms has been very limited, despite its treaty obligations and UPR commitments. This low level of cooperation is particularly worrying given the lack of meaningful access to domestic remedies for human rights violations, which continue to take place with impunity.

CRD-logoHuman Rights Treaties

Laos is state party to seven core international human rights treaties (and two optional protocols): (1)

  • International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) (accession in 1974)
  • Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (accession in 1981)
  • Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and its two Optional Protocols (CRC-OP-AC & CRC-OP-SC) (accession in 1991 & ratification in 2006)
  • International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (accession in 2007)
  • Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (accession in 2009)
  • International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) (accession in 2009)
  • Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) (accession in 2012)

Continue reading “What are…Laos’ International Human Rights Obligations & Commitments?”

Menyelesaikan Permasalahan Pelanggaran HAM di Laos

Pertemuan ASEAN Harus Mengangkat Kasus Hilangnya Pemimpin Sombath Somphone, Penyangkalan Terhadap Kebebasan

BANGKOK, 31 Agustus 2016 – Pada malam pertemuan tahunan pimpinan negara ASEAN di Vientiane, kelompok-kelompok advokasi dan HAM memberikan seruan kepada Pemerintah Laos untuk menangani kasus pelanggaran HAM yang meluas di negara Laos, termasuk kasus penghilangan paksa dan penahanan yang sewenang-wenang. Para pemimpin negara yang hadir memiliki kesempatan unik untuk mengangkat kepedulian mereka terhadap pelanggaran HAM selama pertemuan tersebut di Vientiane dari tanggal 6 sampai 8 September. Mereka harus menekan pemerintah Laos untuk menghentikan pelanggaran HAM yang secara konsisten telah meletakkan Laos pada posisi terendah dalam indeks HAM dan pembangunan yang diukur berdasarkan hak asasi warga negara, kebebasan pres, demokrasi, kebebasan beragama, dan transparansi ekonomi.

Logo-Sombath InitiativePada konferensi pers yang diadakan oleh The Sombath Initiative di Foreign Correspondents Club, Bangkok, Thailand, kelompok-kelompok tersebut mempublikasikan satu set dokumen terkait dengan penghilangan paksa pemimpin masyarakat sipil, Sombath Somphone, pembatasan demokrasi dan HAM oleh pemerintah Laos, kurangnya kebebasan berpendapat, kegagalan pemerintah dalam menjalankan kewajiban HAM, dan dampaknya pada bantuan dan investasi asing.
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ដំណោះស្រាយចំពោះបញ្ហារំលោភសិទ្ធិមនុស្សនៅក្នុងប្រទេសឡាវ

កិច្ចប្រជុំអាស៊ានគួរសង្កត់ធ្ងន់លើការបាត់ខ្លួនមេដឹកនាំ Sambath Somphone ការបដិសេធសេរីភាព

ទីក្រុងបាងកក ថ្ងៃទី៣១ ខែសីហា ឆ្នាំ២០១៦ – នៅមុនពេលនៃកិច្ចជំនួបកំពូលប្រចាំឆ្នាំនៃមេដឹកនាំអាស៊ាននៅក្នុងទីក្រុងវៀងច័ន្ទ ក្រុមការពារសិទ្ធិមនុស្សបានស្នើសុំឲ្យរដ្ឋាភិបាលនៃសាធារណរដ្ឋប្រជាមានិតឡាវ ធ្វើការប្តេជ្ញាចិត្តក្នុងការដោះស្រាយបញ្ហានៃការរំលោភសិទ្ធិមនុស្សយ៉ាងធំធេងដោយរដ្ឋាភិបាល ជាក់ស្តែងរួមមាន បញ្ហាបាត់ខ្លួនដោយបង្ខំ និងការឃុំខ្លួនតាមទំនើងចិត្ត។ មេដឹកនាំពិភពលោកដែលនឹងចូលរួម មានឱកាសពិសេស ដើម្បីលើកឡើងអំពីបញ្ហាសិទ្ធិមនុស្សនៅក្នុងអំឡុងពេលនៃកិច្ចជំនួបកំពូលអាស៊ាន នៅក្នុងទីក្រុងវៀងច័ន្ទ ចាប់ពីថ្ងៃទី០៦ ដល់ថ្ងៃទី០៨ ខែកញ្ញាខាងមុខនេះ។ ពួកគេគួរគាបសង្កត់ឲ្យរដ្ឋាភិបាលឡាវ បញ្ឈប់ការរំលោភបំពានដែលបានធ្វើឲ្យប្រទេសឡាវស្ថិតនៅចំណាត់ថ្នាក់ទាបក្រោមគេ ក្នុងសន្ទស្សន៍ស្តីពីសិទ្ធិ និងការអភិវឌ្ឍន៍ ដែលធ្វើការវាស់ស្ទង់អំពីសិទ្ធិ សេរីភាពសារព័ត៌មាន លទ្ធិប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ សេរីភាពសាសនា និងតម្លាភាពសេដ្ឋកិច្ច។

Logo-Sombath Initiative

នៅឯសន្និសីទសារកាសែត ដែលរៀបចំដោយក្រុមអង្គការឯករាជ្យ The Sombath Initiative នៅក្លឹបអ្នកកាសែតបរទេសនៃប្រទេសថៃ ក្នុងទីក្រុងបាងកក ក្រុមអង្គការនេះបានចេញផ្សាយនូវសំណុំឯកសារពិស្តា ស្តីពីបញ្ហាបាត់ខ្លួនដោយការបង្ខំនូវរូបលោក Sombath Somphone មេដឹកនាំសង្គមស៊ីវិល, ការរឹតបន្តឹងរបស់ប្រទេសឡាវចំពោះលទ្ធិប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ និងសិទ្ធិមនុស្ស, ភាពខ្វះខាតនៃសេរីភាពបញ្ចេញមតិ, បរាជ័យក្នុងបំពេញកាតព្វកិច្ចសិទ្ធិមនុស្ស, ផលប៉ះពាល់នៃការវិនិយោគទុន និងជំនួយបរទេស។
Continue reading “ដំណោះស្រាយចំពោះបញ្ហារំលោភសិទ្ធិមនុស្សនៅក្នុងប្រទេសឡាវ”

ラオスの人権問題に取り組みを

アセアン首脳会談で、社会活動家ソムバット氏の失踪事件や自由のはく奪問題を焦点に

(2016年8月31日、バンコク発) 東南アジア諸国連合(アセアン)がラオス人民民主共和 国の首都ビエンチャンで年次首脳会談を開催するに先立ち、人権団体をはじめ複数の NGO は、 ラオス政府に対して、国内で多発する強制失踪や不当逮捕などの人権問題に真剣に取り組むよ う呼びかけた。9 月 6 日から 8 日、ビエンチャンで開催されるアセアン首脳会談は、世界の指 導者たちが公式の場で人権問題への関心を表明する絶好の機会である。世界の指導者たちは、 権利の尊重、報道の自由、民主主義、信教の自由、財政の透明性といった人権・開発指標で常 に下位にランクされるラオスに対して、その元凶である人権侵害を根絶するよう働きかけるべ きである

Logo-Sombath Initiative8 月 31 日、バンコクのタイ外国人記者クラブで主催した会見の席で、ソムバット・イニシアテ ィブのメンバーは、社会活動家ソムバット・ソムポーン氏の強制失踪事件をはじめ、ラオスに おける民主主義と人権の制限、表現の自由への介入、人権擁護義務の不履行、海外からの開発 援助や投資の影響をまとめたブリーフィング・ペーパーを公表した。

Continue reading “ラオスの人権問題に取り組みを”

ASEAN in Laos: Challenges of Leadership, Human Rights & Democracy

Press conference held at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Thailand on 31 August, 2016, Bangkok 

RFA-FCCT-2016

Panelists included (click on link for their presentation):

  • Shui Meng Ng, Spouse of Sombath Somphone
  • Walden Bello, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights
  • Laurent Meillan, Acting Regional Representative of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

With moderation by Phil Robertson, Deputy Director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch.

Video of the press conference is available in three segments: One, two & three.

The following press briefings were also distributed:

လာအိုုႏိုုင္ငံရွိလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မွဳမ်ားကိုု ကိုုင္တြယ္ေျဖရွင္းျခင္း

အာဆီယံထိပ္သီးေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအစည္းအေ၀းတြင္ ေပ်ာက္ကြယ္လ်က္ရွိေသာ  ေခါင္းေဆာင္ Sombath Somphone အေျကာင္းကိုု အေလးထားေဆြးေႏြးသင့္,လြတ္လပ္မွဳကိုု ျငင္းဆိုုျခင္း

ဘန္ေကာက၊္ ၃၁ ရက္ေန႔၊ ျသဂုုတ္လ၊ ၂၀၁၆။ ဗီယန္က်င္းျမိဳ့တြင္ က်င္းပမည့္ အာဆီယံေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား အစည္းအေ၀းမတိုင္မီညေနတြင္ တရားမ၀င္ထိန္းသိမ္းအက်ဥ္းခ်ျခင္း၊ ဖမ္းဆီးခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ျခင္းျဖစ္စဥ္မ်ား အပါအ၀င္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္အျကမ္းဖက္မွဳမ်ားကို ေဆြးေႏြးအေျဖရွာရန္ လာအိုႏိုင္ငံအစိုးရအား လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆိုင္ရာအဖြဲ႔မ်ားက ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပါသည္။ စက္တင္ဘာလ ၆ ရက္ေန႔မွ ၈ ရက္ေန႔ အထိျပဳလုပ္မည့္ အာဆီယံအစည္းအေ၀းတြင္ ကမၻာႏိုင္ငံေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားသည္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆိုင္ရာ ျပသာနာမ်ားကို ေဆြးေႏြးအေျဖရွာႏိုင္ျကမည္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္ အေရးႏွင့္ရပိုင္ခြင့္မ်ား၊ မီဒီယာလြတ္လပ္ခြင့္၊ ဒီမိုကေရစီ၊ ဘာသာေရးလြတ္လပ္ခြင့္ႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရး ပြင့္လင္း ျမင္သာမွဳ တိုင္းတာေရးစံႏွဳန္းအဆင့္မ်ားတြင္ လာအိုႏိုင္ငံအား ေအာက္ဆံုးအဆင့္ေရာက္ေစသည့္ ညွဥ္းပန္းႏွိပ္စက္မတရားျပဳမွဳမ်ားကို မျပဳလုပ္ရန္ လာအိုအစိုးရအား ဖိအားေပးသင့္သည္။

Logo-Sombath Initiative

ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ၊ ဘန္ေကာက္ျမိဳ႔ရွိ ႏိုင္ငံျခားသတင္းေထာက္မ်ားကလပ္တြင္ The Sombath Initiative က ဦးစီးျပီး ယေန႔က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္သည့္ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပြဲတြင္ အရပ္ဘက္အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေခါင္းေဆာင္ Sombath Somphone ရုတ္တရက္ေပ်ာက္ကြယ္သြားမွဳ၊ လာအိုႏိုင္ငံ၏ဒီမိုကေရစီႏွင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ဆိုင္ရာတားျမစ္ခ်က္မ်ား၊ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ဆနၵထုတ္ေဖာ္ခြင့္အားနည္းျခင္း၊ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆုိင္ရာ ကတိက၀တ္မ်ားကို ေဖာ္ေဆာင္ရန္ပ်က္ကြက္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအေထာက္အပံ့မ်ားနွင့္ ရင္းႏွီး ျမွဳပ္ႏွံမွဳအက်ိဳးသက္ေရာက္မွဳမ်ား ပါ၀င္သည့္စာတမ္းမ်ားကို ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့ျကသည္။
Continue reading “လာအိုုႏိုုင္ငံရွိလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မွဳမ်ားကိုု ကိုုင္တြယ္ေျဖရွင္းျခင္း”

Tackle Human Rights Abuses in Laos

ASEAN Meeting Should Highlight Disappeared Leader Sombath Somphone, Denial of Liberties 

(Bangkok, August 31, 2016) – On the eve of the annual ASEAN leaders summit in Vientiane, human rights and advocacy groups called upon the Lao PDR Government to commit to address its widespread violations of human rights, including instances of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention. Visiting world leaders have a unique opportunity to publicly raise human rights concerns during the ASEAN summit in Vientiane from September 6-8. They should press the Lao government to cease the abuses that have consistently placed Laos at the bottom of rig hts and development indexes measuring rights, press freedom, democracy, religious freedom, and economic transparency.

ALogo-Sombath Initiativet the press conference organized today by The Sombath Initiative at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand in Bangkok, the groups released briefing papers on forcibly disappeared civil society leader Sombath Somphone, Laos’ restrictions on democracy and human rights, lack freedom of expression, failure to meet human rights obligations, and impacts of foreign aid and investment. Continue reading “Tackle Human Rights Abuses in Laos”

ASEAN in Laos: Challenges of Leadership, Human Rights and Democracy

ASEAN logo 2016Press conference at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Thailand

11am, Wednesday 31 August, 2016, Bangkok 

At a time when ASEAN is witnessing an alarming increase in human rights abuses, restrictions on civil liberties, and a shrinking of democratic space in a number of its member states, what kind of example does this year’s ASEAN Chair, Laos, set for the regional bloc?

The enforced disappearance of prominent civil society leader Sombath Somphone in December 2012, ongoing arbitrary detentions, and extremely tight controls on the media and civil society have instilled an environment of fear, silence, and repression in Laos. Little news about the serious human rights abuses occurring in the country ever comes out in the media, allowing the continued violation of basic liberties.

Despite this repressive environment, foreign aid and investment continue to flow into Laos. Continue reading “ASEAN in Laos: Challenges of Leadership, Human Rights and Democracy”

1,000 days on, Sombath’s enforced disappearance a clear dereliction of Lao’s international obligations

1000 days11 September 2015

Today marks 1,000 days since prominent Lao civil society leader Sombath Somphone “disappeared” at a police checkpoint on a busy street in Vientiane. We, the undersigned organizations, reiterate our call for the Lao government to intensify its efforts to conduct a prompt, impartial, and effective investigation into Sombath’s apparent enforced disappearance, to determine his fate or whereabouts, and to take the necessary measures to bring those responsible to justice.

At the second Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Laos, held in Geneva on 20 January 2015, 10 states made recommendations to Laos to investigate Sombath’s disappearance. In addition, five states raised questions about the issue.

We are dismayed by the Lao authorities’ failure to provide any specific information on the status and progress of the investigation since 7 June 2013. This failure has occurred despite the government’s claim in June 2015, during the UPR process, that it was “still thoroughly conducting” an investigation into Sombath’s “whereabouts.” It is not enough for Laos to simply assert it is still investigating the case. Laos’ international legal obligations require it to carry out a prompt investigation and to keep Sombath’s family informed on the progress and status of the investigation. Continue reading “1,000 days on, Sombath’s enforced disappearance a clear dereliction of Lao’s international obligations”