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More News & Events | Home
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Nov. 01, 2007 – Three student groups sponsored a panel discussion at Brooklyn Law School on October 17 that was designed to educate the school’s community about human rights violations stemming from the long history of repression of ethnic minorities by the Burmese military government. Over 75 students attended the event, which was co-sponsored by the International Law Society, the BLS Chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild, and the Asian Pacific Law Students Association. The event began with a short film, Shoot on Sight, that displayed footage of villagers from rural Burma fleeing their homes to escape being discovered and forced into slave labor by the military. Sam Gregory, the producer of the video and a staff member of WITNESS, an international human rights organization that provides training and support to local groups that advocate for human rights, gave an overview of the history of the Burmese struggle. Gregory also spoke about his own experience assisting minority ethnic groups in rural Burma. “Over the past 20 years, the military government has set out to ensure that the ethnic minorities, including the Karen in the southeastern part of the state, receive the four cuts,” he explained. “Cut off food, cut off funds, cut off recruits and cut off intelligence.” The plight of the Burmese people received national media attention recently, when the military government raised prices on gas and other necessities. In protest, thousands of Monks and other pro-democracy Burmese demonstrated against the government in the streets, only to be met with the military’s brutal attacks and thousands of arrests. “There is not a human right in the book that the Burmese military government has not violated,” according to Professor Samuel Murumba, a human rights specialist at the Law School. When pressed about what could be done to hold the leaders of Burma responsible for the actions of the military government, Professor Murumba said, “Outside a United Nations Security Council resolution, which was passed last year and then vetoed by Russia and China, which are Burmese weapon suppliers, the only hope is to use public opinion to shame the nations that are supplying the Burmese government into recognizing the tremendous human rights violations they are facilitating.” Melissa Brennan, a second-year student and organizer of the event, said that she experienced the plight of the Burmese people first-hand this summer when she interned in Thailand with the UN Interagency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region. “The people lucky enough to escape from Burma are still living in terrible conditions,” said Melissa, whose work was funded by her Sparer Fellowship. “Refugees continue to be discriminated against in Thailand because they are completely politically powerless and have been abused.”
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