Yoma 3, Thailand & Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong
On 17 April 2007 four men travelled to Hinthada (Henzada) Township, about 30 miles west of Rangoon, for a human rights education session. They carried with them documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Burma is a signatory.
At about 12:30pm on April 18, the group set out from Oatpone to another nearby village on two motorcycles. As they were passing the Yatanathiri Monastery on the way to Taluttaw at the outskirts of the village, a gang of around 50 persons came on to the road with slingshots and sticks to assault them. The first motorcycle with Ko Tin Maung Oo and Ko Yin Kyi could escape, but the second motorcycle, carrying Ko Maung Maung Lay and Ko Myint Naing, was stopped and the two men encircled and beaten up.
A pick-up truck carrying some monks came and broke up the attack. The two injured men were put onto the vehicle and taken to Taluttaw police station, from where they were transferred to Hinthada Township Hospital. Myint Naing was seriously injured, with six incisions to his head, and suffering concussion. Maung Maung Lay had minor injuries to the head. Their bodies also had minor injuries all over them caused by the beating and slingshot pellets. The two victims were transferred for emergency treatment and x-rays at the intensive care unit in Rangoon around 10pm that night.
The attack was allegedly organised by executives of the government mass-movement 
organisation, the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA). During the night that the group stayed at Oatpone village, a USDA township official, local police officers and at least one officer from the police special branch also came to stay there. In the morning it was reported that an official from the township council came too. The attackers are alleged to have been USDA members, and police and security forces in plain clothes.
The four belonged with a group set up since 2002 to promote human rights standards to which Burma has already agreed to comply, known as Human Rights Defenders and Promoters (HRDP). On April 20, the HRDP organiser, U Myint Aye, made a written complaint to the local police chief, in which he accused the local USDA secretary of having coordinated the attack. In the complaint he quotes the secretary, U Nyunt Oo, as having shouted to the group of attackers to “Strike, hit, kill them!” He said that in addition to the injuries to the two men who could not escape, the gang stole their possessions, including a digital camera, voice recorder, watch and cash.
On April 23, the state-run newspapers ran articles against the group in which they accused it of going to stir up trouble and that villagers had insisted that “there were no incidents of human rights abuse” in their area. It said that when the group had gone to Oatpone and the villagers had tried to have them leave a confrontation had followed, but that the authorities and local abbot had resolved it.
Two days later, the UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar and the Special Representative
on human rights defenders made a joint statement in which they said of the incident that “the level of violence and the absence of intervention by the local police to protect the victims… remind us of the circumstances surrounding the tragic incident of Depayin in 2003”, where an army-organised gang attacked a convoy carrying the Nobel Prize laureate, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
The court cases
After the news reports, on April 24 the authorities sent notices to the Hinthada 6 indicating that they would be charged with intent to cause a public disturbance. Two local village council chairmen lodged two separate complaints in the township court under the Penal Code that the accused had made statements “with intent to cause… fear or alarm to the public… whereby any person may be induced to commit an offence against the State or against the public tranquility” (section 505[b]) and “with intent to incite… any class or community of persons to commit any offence against any other class or community” (section 505[c]). Their accusations related not to the attack of April 18 itself but to a series of incidents in the lead-up to it, including that the men had been falsely alleging forced labour and creating local disputes among villagers, one concerning the alleged theft of a duck, another relating to a bicycle accident between a schoolteacher and a local resident.
On May 2, Ko Myint Naing himself lodged a criminal complaint in the Hinthada court against 12 persons, including the USDA secretary and another official, police chief and his deputy, and four ten-household heads under Penal Code sections 325, 326, 337, 350, 392 and 114, for causing grievous bodily harm with dangerous weapons and endangering life, criminal force, robbery, and aiding and abetting. In the complaint, he described how many local council members were among the attackers. He also described how as he tried to flee the assault he ran towards the local police chief and his head of security, standing and watching at one side. At that time, the latter himself pulled a slingshot out of his bag and fired a steel pellet into Myint Naing’s stomach. He was then again surrounded and had his possessions looted. By this time villagers had assembled to see what was happening, but the perpetrators blocked them from offering assistance. It was not until the abbot of the Buddhist monastery came in a pickup truck that the perpetrators dispersed and allowed the monk to ferry them to safety.
The Hinthada 6: Line up of key alleged perpetrators & abettors
1. U Nyunt Oo, Secretary, Township Union Solidarity and Development Association
(USDA), Hinthada Township (organised and participated in attack)
2. Superintendent Htun Htun Win, Acting Station Commander, Myanmar Police
Force, Taluttaw village, Hinthada (assisted and observed attack)
3. Deputy Superintendent Than Taik, Security Chief, Myanmar Police Force,
Taluttaw village, Hinthada (assisted and observed attack)
4. U Win Zaw Oo, Chairman, Eingapoe Village Tract Peace & Development Council (PDC), Eingapoe village, Hinthada (lodged felony case no. 742/2007 [Hinthada] against Myint Naing & Kyaw Lwin)
5. Ko Aung Than, Chairman, Kanyinngu Village Tract PDC, Oatpone village, Hinthada (assisted in organising attack; lodged criminal case no. 743/2007 [Hinthada] against Myint Naing , Mya Sein, Hla Shein, Ko Win & Ko Myint)
6. Ko Soe Win, Ten-household Head, Kanyinngu Village Tract PDC (participated in attack)
7. Ko Win Hlaing, Ten-household Head, Kanyinngu Village Tract PDC (participated in attack)
8. Ko Sapu, Ten-household Head, Kanyinngu Village Tract PDC (participated in attack)
9. Ko Htay Win, Executive, Village USDA, Kanyinngu village, Kanyinngu Village Tract (participated in attack)
10. U Aung Min, Judge (special powers), Hinthada Township Court (presiding judge) 10. Daw Myint Myint San, Judge, Hinthada Township Court (preliminary hearings) 11. U Myint Swe, Township Law Officer, Hinthada (prosecutor)
The same day that he lodged his complaint the preliminary hearings in the two cases 
against him and the five others were heard in the same court. Judge Daw Myint Myint San ordered all six men to be kept in custody, including Myint Naing, who was still receiving treatment for the head injuries he suffered during the April assault.
On May 4 when hearings continued the defendants saw that someone allegedly from the Office of Military Affairs Security appeared to be secretly recording the proceedings in court. Their lawyer complained and the judge had the man taken from the court by the police, but nothing is known of what happened after that. There were around 200 persons in court to support the defendants; so, on May 11 when the hearings continued around 60 persons came to the court as observers on the side of the state, after the authorities had reportedly sent instructions that five persons should be sent from each ward in Hinthada town.
On May 24 the lawyers for the six again approached the court for bail on grounds that it was the time for planting rice and as the defendants are farmers if they could not go ahead with planting it would severely affect their families (who were already facing economic hardship due to the defendants being imprisoned); and, that Myint Naing needed to have medical consultations. But Township Law Officer U Myint Swe opposed granting of bail, claiming that Myint Naing had recovered, and next day the court again refused to grant bail. The doctor tending to Myint Naing was reportedly been refused access to the prison in Hinthada where he was being held.
The lawyers to six lodged petitions for charges to be dismissed on the grounds of lack of evidence and because the allegations against the accused didn’t fit with the charges that have been lodged against them. In a lengthy submission with numerous citations of case law to support their assertions, they also questioned the authority of the local officials to lodge such charges and suggested that only township police commanders or above could lodge these charges, as per section 45 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC).
On June 8 the township court reviewed the police report about the April 18 incident and accepted the complaint on just one relatively-minor charge of voluntarily causing hurt (a one-year jail term if found guilty), and only against six minor accused, namely three ten-household heads—Ko Soe Win, Ko Win Hlaing and Ko Sapu—and three ordinary villagers; it omitted the other six, including all of the primary accused: the local council chairman, USDA secretary and local police. The judge did not call the accused police or others to court to conduct his own inquiries as he is empowered to do, but just followed the police findings. Unlike the six human rights defenders, the six accused in this case were all given bail. A request by Myint Naing’s lawyer to have the local council chairman and police appear as witnesses in this trial was refused. The case is not known to have proceeded.
On July 24 the court found the six accused rights defenders guilty, despite a lack of any firm evidence concerning the series of random allegations against them: Myint Naing was sentenced to eight years, as he was a respondent to both criminal cases; the other four to four years each, two years under each offence. As in many other cases of this kind in Burma, the judge’s main role was to summarize the parts of the hearings suited to his purposes, iterate the charge and give a sentence. Neither of the judgments contains anything approaching legal reasoning for the verdict. On the contrary, the decisions are summed up with a single line, that, “It is found that the defendants have violated Penal Code section 505(b)/(c) and the sentence is passed accordingly as follows…”
The lawyers for the six men have lodged appeals against the sentences and at time of writing they had proceeded to, and been refused a hearing in, the sub-divisional courts.
An Open Letter to the UN Special Representative on human rights defenders
AHRC-OL-025-2007, 1 August 2007
Ms. Hina Jilani
Special Representative of the Secretary General on the situation of human rights defenders
Room 1-040
C/o OHCHR-UNOG
1211 Geneva 10
SWITZERLAND
Dear Ms Jilani
BURMA/MYANMAR: Concerted attacks on human rights defenders demand stronger and better-informed international response
The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is writing to you today further to your press release of 25 April 2007, issued together with the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, concerning the attack on a group of Burmese human rights defenders in Hinthada (Hinthada) of April 18.
We thank you for your interest and concern in this case, which the AHRC has been following closely, in which one person suffered serious head injuries. However, the AHRC is concerned that a much stronger and better-informed international response is needed to draw attention to a pattern of both extra-legal and legal attacks on human rights defenders in Myanmar during recent times.
The Hinthada case speaks to this pattern. Whereas in your press release you called for the government and relevant authorities “to take all the necessary steps to protect human rights defenders” and also “to conduct an independent and thorough investigation into this event” in fact what has happened instead is that the victim of the attack, Ko Myint Naing, and another five persons, all local farmers, were themselves charged and on July 24 sentenced to eight and four years in prison respectively for allegedly upsetting public tranquillity and thereby provoking the assault. As to who was really responsible, according to the victims, it was organised by the head of the local chapter of the government-backed Union Solidarity and Development Association, together with members of the local council and police. However, the complaint by Myint Naing in the township court has proceeded only on a single charge against three minor officials and three civilians; not one of the senior council officials or police has even been called to appear in the court as a witness.
Meanwhile, a colleague of the Hinthada group in the lower Burma town of Pyay was on July 10 himself accused of conducting illegal tuition after holding a discussion on human rights at his house, from which around a hundred copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were reportedly removed. On July 30 he too was convicted and sentenced to three years in jail. His case is reminiscent of the arrest and jailing of U Aung Pe, who on 25 August 2005 was sentenced to three years on the same charge, due to his hanging a t-shirt bearing an image of Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on his classroom wall.
It should be noted that the activities of the human rights defenders in Hinthada and Pyay could hardly be considered provocative or political. They had been distributing and discussing the contents of the UDHR, which Myanmar joined at its inception (then as Burma), as well as the international Convention on the Rights of the Child and Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which it joined in turn in 1991 and 1997. They had been examining the practical implications of these instruments for their own country, and had been discussing and taking up some local cases with the assistance of a few lawyers. Indeed, the attack in Hinthada seems to have been provoked in part over allegations of theft of a duck: a far cry from anything that might seriously threaten public tranquillity.
These incidents, it must be added, come at a time of growing numbers of attacks and threats against persons throughout the country, including those who have engaged in a prayer campaign for the release of political prisoners, as well as persons caught up in ordinary criminal cases. The AHRC has obtained documents that reveal the hand of the township councils in organising and deploying gangs of thugs as an alternative to the conventional security forces, and is concerned that this presages special risks to human rights defenders in the near future, including the possibility of further large-scale attacks, like that at Depayin in 2003.
We thus call upon you to show some leadership at this very important and dangerous time for human rights defenders in Myanmar and seek concerted international action to see that those that have been imprisoned are released, and that no further attacks occur.
However, in order to do this effectively it is also necessary for you to understand fully the real issues. Generic demands, such as that there be “independent and thorough” investigations, mean nothing in Myanmar. Who or what will conduct an independent and thorough investigation there? Neither the means nor relevant authorities exist for such investigations to take place. Nor is there any point in pretending that they do.
It is therefore essential that the heavy institutional and systemic obstacles to the defence of human rights in Myanmar–in the criminal justice system especially–obtain your serious attention through detailed research into individual cases and related problems. There are many persons, both in Myanmar and abroad, who will be more than willing to assist you in this respect, including our organisation and its associates, if you will be prepared to go beyond the superficial characteristics of abuse to more substantive work.
The only interventions that are of any good effect are informed interventions, and this is especially the case for work in the defence of human rights in Myanmar. Hence, we kindly urge you to obtain and study all of the available information on the structural problems there in order to be able to contribute to a more meaningful discussion about what needs to be done and how it might be done.
Yours sincerely
Basil Fernando
Executive Director
Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong
article 2 October-December 2007 Vol. 6, No. 5-6
Related case: Ko Min Min
Yoma 3 and the Asian Human Rights Commission have also monitored the related case of another member of the HRDP who was arrested on 10 July 2007 after holding a discussion about human rights in his house the day before.
Ko Min Min (a.k.a. La Min Htun) was charged and tried under section 23 of the 1984 Tuition Law with organising illegal classes because he held a meeting of about 20 persons to discuss basic human rights at his house on Bogyoke Road in Thayetdaw Ward of Pyay town, Pegu Division. The 30-year-old had previously held tuition classes there but had stopped some time earlier. After police from town Police Station No. 2 arrested him he was kept in prison awaiting and during trial.
In court, Min Min and other witnesses testified that whereas he had previously obtained a permit from the local Township Education Office to tutor students at his house, when it expired he had gone to teach at another centre, and had removed the board advertising tuition.
Notwithstanding, on July 30 Min Min was given the maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 Burmese Kyat (USD 250), concluding that the evidence presented on his behalf “has not been firmly established”. Witnesses at the courtroom said that around one hundred former students and friends had come to support Min Min, and many began crying when Judge U Khin Maung Win gave the order.
Ironically, Min Min was jailed at the very same time that the government of Burma was reluctantly agreeing to the setting up of a human rights mechanism under the new proposed charter of the Association of South East Asian Nations.
Min Min’s case is similar to that of U Aung Pe, who was also charged with holding illegal tuition after he put a t-shirt bearing a picture of democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi where he was giving voluntary lessons for poor children (UP-029-2007; UP-030-2006; UP-132-2005; AHRC-PL-012-2006). The order convicting Aung Pe makes clear that the reason for his imprisonment is that he hung the t-shirt, although this is not a crime under the law in Burma, least of all under the Tuition Law. Aung Pe is still in prison.