rsbtws, Author at Sombath Somphone | ສົມບັດ ສົມພອນ

September 7, 2016September 10, 2016

HRF to President Obama: Inquire into Disappearance of Activist in Laos

Human Rights Foundation: 06 September 2016

Human Rights Foundation (HRF) urges President Barack Obama to demand a renewed investigation into the disappearance of civil society leader Sombath Somphone during his visit to Laos to attend the U.S.-ASEAN Summit. The first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos, President Obama arrived in Vientiane on Tuesday morning and met with Laotian President Bounnhang Vorachit. On August 25, HRF, along with 44 organizations and individuals, addressed a letter to President Obama asking that he pressure the government of Laos to investigate into Sombath’s disappearance and create a safe public domain for non-profit organizations and independent media. Sombath was abducted from a police checkpoint on December 15, 2012. Family members were later allowed access to CCTV footage that showed Sombath being abducted, but the government of Laos has maintained its lack of involvement in the abduction.

Continue reading “HRF to President Obama: Inquire into Disappearance of Activist in Laos”

September 7, 2016

The questions Laos doesn’t want to answer

Amnesty International: 06 September 2016

Nestled in the Mekong region, with mighty China to its north, is landlocked Laos. Famed for its sedate surroundings, and tragically the country where the U.S. dropped more than 260 million bombs during its war in Indochina, it rarely receives the attention received by its more prominent neighbours.

This week, Barack Obama will become the first U.S. President to ever visit the country for the ASEAN summit. In advance of the visit, US officials have spoken of an emerging partnership on development between the two countries, which focuses on health, nutrition and basic education.

As visitors frequently note, the pace of life is slow in Laos, remarkably so. But beneath the tranquil surface that President Obama will encounter, there lurk endemic human rights problems. Continue reading “The questions Laos doesn’t want to answer”

September 7, 2016September 8, 2016

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។

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

September 6, 2016

Can Laos stand the spotlight?

Manila Times: 06 September 2016

Laos has adopted the efficient practice of hosting two Asean summits at one go. Why bother organising two events months apart? We already have a lot of domestic homework and who wants to meet world leaders that often, especially if all they’re going to do is nag us about democracy and human rights?

Photo-ops and friendly handshakes are what many Asean leaders prefer — either to silence noisy critics at home or to confer legitimacy if, for instance, they took power after a coup.

So bravo to Malaysia, the 2015 host which lived up to the gentlemen’s agreement for more talking-shops. The dual summits made their debut during Thailand’s chairmanship of Asean in 2009. A decade earlier, leaders were content to meet every two or three years. Continue reading “Can Laos stand the spotlight?”

September 6, 2016December 18, 2016

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

8 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”

September 6, 2016

As the world’s leaders head for Laos, wife of missing activist makes her plea

Sydney Morning Herald: 05 September 2016

CCTV vision captures the last known images of Sombath Somphone who disappeared in December 2012 on the streets of Vientiane, Laos.

The wife of missing social activist Sombath Somphone has appealed to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, US President Barack Obama and other world leaders to press Laos’ communist leaders about his fate when they arrive in the South-east Asian nation on Tuesday.

Shui Meng Ng says she hopes Laotian leaders will not brush off concerns about her husband of more than 30 years with the response that police are still investigating.

“I hope this time they will show some good will and sincerity by agreeing to accept international assistance and conduct a serious and transparent investigation into what happened to Sombath,” Ms Ng told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand.

“Maybe it is pie in the sky. But whatever the response, I can never give up hope and I will not be deterred from my search,” she said. Continue reading “As the world’s leaders head for Laos, wife of missing activist makes her plea”

September 5, 2016

Where’s Sombath? Activist’s mysterious abduction a human rights thorn for Laos as it hosts major summit

South China Morning Post: 05 September 2016

The disappearance of an award-winning activist nearly four years ago is a reminder of the dismal human rights record of the authoritarian government of the tiny landlocked nation.

The light was fading over Vientiane on a cool December evening when a Jeep was stopped at a traffic light. CCTV video later showed the occupant of the car being pulled out and taken away in a pickup truck, never to be seen again.

The disappearance of Sombath Somphone nearly four years ago is a reminder of the dismal human rights record of the authoritarian government of Laos, which prepares to host Asian leaders and US President Barack Obama at a regional summit starting Tuesday. Continue reading “Where’s Sombath? Activist’s mysterious abduction a human rights thorn for Laos as it hosts major summit”

September 2, 2016

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

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:

September 2, 2016

ขบวนการหนุ่มสาวลาวร้องหน้า UN ปล่อย 3 คนลาวที่ถูกจับเพราะวิจารณ์รัฐ

ประชาไทย: 31 สิงหา 2016

ขบวนการหนุ่มสาวเพื่อประชาธิปไตยแอคชั่นหน้า UN ในไทย เรียกร้องรัฐบาลลาวหยุดละเมิดสิทธิ ปล่อยตัวสามคนลาวที่ถูกจับเพราะวิพากษ์รัฐผ่านอินเทอร์เน็ต

หน้าองค์กรสหประชาชาติ (UN) ขบวนการหนุ่มสาวลาวเพื่อประชาธิปไตย จำนวน 4 คน นำโดย ตามใจ ไคยะวงศ์ (Tamchay Khayavowg) ยื่นหนังสือต่อสหประชาชาติและจัดกิจกรรมชูป้ายเพื่อเรียกร้องให้รัฐบาลลาวปล่อยตัวสามคนลาวที่ถูกจับเมื่อวันที่ 5 มี.ค. 2559 ในคดีวิพากษ์วิจารณ์รัฐบาลลาวบนสื่อสังคมออนไลน์ โดยแผ่นป้ายมีข้อความเรียกร้องให้คืนเสรีภาพและหยุดการละเมิดสิทธิมนุษยชนในลาว “Please return to freedom” “Stop! Human Rights violations in Laos, FREE LAO” Continue reading “ขบวนการหนุ่มสาวลาวร้องหน้า UN ปล่อย 3 คนลาวที่ถูกจับเพราะวิจารณ์รัฐ”

September 2, 2016September 13, 2016

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။

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”