Every parliamentarian who is in jail in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations is locked up in Myanmar and all but one of them had been members of the National League for Democracy (NLD), according to a network of current and former ASEAN parliamentarians.
“Myanmar remains the worst country when it comes to jailing members of parliament, with all 74 of those detained in the region being held there,” ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) said in its annual “Parliamentarians at Risk” report released on Thursday.
The annual report highlights human rights violations faced by parliamentarians in ASEAN.
All but one of the 74 parliamentarians jailed in Myanmar by the junta are from the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy (NLD), which formed the civilian government ousted by a military coup on Feb. 1, 2021. The other is from the Mon Unity Party.
The fact that NLD MPs have been overwhelmingly targeted demonstrates that their imprisonment is politically motivated, APHR said. The NLD won a landslide victory in the 2020 election, shortly before the coup.
“Many of the ousted parliamentarians are continuing their work in hiding, either inside Myanmar or abroad, because if found by the military they are at risk of detention, torture, and even death,” the report said. “Some have seen their family members harassed and their properties seized by the military.”
Myanmar’s national, regional and state parliaments have been suspended since the coup, and dozens of their members have been arrested.
As of March 28, 2024, there were 74 parliamentarians in detention in Myanmar, the report said, citing data from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. That number is 10 people lower than the number in the 2022 report by the ASEAN parliamentarians.
It said 61 lawmakers – 50 men and 11 women – who were in Myanmar prisons in 2022 were released last year.
Sixty-eight of the MPs detained in Myanmar are men and eight are women. Thirty-four were parliamentarians that the national level (21 had been in the Lower House and three in the Upper House), while the remaining 50 had been in regional and state parliaments.
Attacks against NLD MPs and party members continued in 2023, the report said.
In January 2023, NLD MP U Win Win was arrested by regime forces. He had represented Magway’s Minbu Township. In September, a ward chairman for the NLD in Ayeyarwady Region, was killed days after he was arrested by regime authorities. In November, Than Su, an NLD member for Mandalay’s Chanayethaza Township, was arrested along with her adult son and a house guest.
Harassment of lawmakers takes place elsewhere in ASEAN. The report notes that opposition lawmakers in Thailand and Cambodia, in particular, face judicial harassment. In Thailand, a non-democratic state apparatus was used to prevent the will of the people from being fulfilled, the report notes, pointing to the Move Forward Pary and its former leader Pita Limjaroenrat.
Even though the party won the most seats in Thailand’s May 2023 election, it was prevented from forming a government by unelected senators. Pita was also prevented from becoming the country’s prime minister by the unelected Senate. Both the party and its former leader have been victims of a campaign of judicial harassment, the report by the ASEAN parliamentarians says.
It recommends that ASEAN admit that its so-called Five-Point Consensus has failed and that it negotiates a new plan to address Myanmar’s crisis with the National Unity Government and ethnic armed organizations. The report also calls on ASEAN to “publicly recognize that the 2020 elections in Myanmar were reflective of the will of the people” and that the civilian National Unity Government represents the people.
