CSW & Jubilee Campaign Attend Press Conference on Burma Genocide & Chemical Weapons

John Bercow MP will chair a press conference with Guy Horton in Jubilee Room, House of Commons on 23 June at 11am. Lord David Alton and Wilfred Wong, Parliamentary Officer for the human rights organisation, the Jubilee Campaign and Dr. Martin Panter, International President of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) will join the press conference and unite in the call for democratic change in Burma, CSW announced yesterday.

Guy Horton, author of the 'Dying Alive: A Legal Assessment of Human Rights Violations in Burma' is intensively gathering information about the human rights abuses over the past five years, so that Burma's regime may be taken to an international forum such as the International Criminal Court.

Horton is documenting the human rights abuses in Burma. He has documented evidence of slave labour, systematic rape, the conscription of child soldiers, massacres and the destruction of villages with aim to prompt the international community to do more to prevent the estimated 10,000 deaths at the hands of the Burmese military regime every year since they seized power.

Guy Horton's claim for the use of the word 'genocide' in relation to Burma rests on the 1948 Genocide Convention, ratified by Burma in 1956. According to the convention, the genocide is described as 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part'. There are over a million people internally displaced in Burma and more than 2,500 villages in eastern Burma have been destroyed since 1996.

Dr. Martin Panter, International President of CSW, has visited the Thai/Burma border many times since 1989, including this year's two visits in April and May. He interviewed witnesses of the use of chemical weapons by the Burmese Army.

John Bercow MP (Cons, Buckingham) is Joint Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Burma and joined CSW to visit Thai/Burma border in April 2004.

In a speech in the House of Commons in November 2004, he listed the many abuses of the Burmese regime: "The use of rape as a weapon of war; compulsory relocation; forced labour; the use of child soldiers on a scale greater proportionately than in any other country in the world; the use of human minesweepers; water torture; and the continued incarceration of no fewer than 1,400 political prisoners, including the ongoing detention under house arrest of Nobel prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. The situation is extraordinarily serious." He then went on to call for a "robust programme of sanctions."

"The suffering is immense. The crisis is real, the atrocities continue, the pain is now."

"There have been continual attacks by the Burma army-the Tatmadaw-on the Karen, the Karenni, the Shan and the Chin people, to name but four examples of ethnic nationals targeted, vilified, attacked, maimed, disfigured, raped and murdered on the deliberate say-so of the so-called State Peace and Development Council, the name of the ruling regime"

The aim of the press conference is to call on the UK and like-minded nations, such as the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic and South Africa to initiate legal action to punish the Burmese Junta for violating Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, Crimes against Humanity, and attempted Genocide.