Month: April 2010
NLD MPs fight for right to exist in top court
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – National League for Democracy members of Parliament on Thursday filed a lawsuit with Burma’s Supreme Court seeking a writ against dissolution of the party and to declare that the members of Parliament can still legally maintain their positions, party leaders said.
The NLD move was designed to head off its dissolution under the junta’s new political party registration law, which required parties to re-register within 60 days of May 6 or be dissolved as legal entities, a party spokesman said.
The law also rendered invalid the positions of Members of Parliament elected in the 1990 election. That injustice had forced the NLD to seek a court order to declare the MPs’ right to exist and call the original 1990 elected Parliament, he said.
Lawyers Kyin Win, Khin Htay Kywe and Kyaw Ho, visited the court to file the suit at 11 a.m. on Thursday and Su Nge, the deputy director of the Supreme Court, accepted their documents at 1 p.m.
The leaders were responding to party general secretary Aung San Suu Kyi’s urging for members to continue pursuing legal actions against the junta. Twenty-six members of Parliament elected in the 1990 election, including party chairman Aung Shwe, were listed as plaintiffs in the filing, the spokesman said. Sanchaung Township MP Khin Maung Swe and Kyauktan Township MP, Dr. Than Nyein, who had pushed for the party to re-register with the Election Commission, joined them.
The court would release its decision on whether it will hear the case on April 30 at 1 p.m. If the court accepts the lawsuit, the two cases will be handled individually, the spokesman said.
Although NLD won 392 of 485 seats in the election 20 years ago, the junta has refused to transfer power to the party.
Observers said the action would almost certainly be ineffective as Burmese court decisions were always in step with the junta’s wishes.
Nyan Win said, “All I want to say is that we will take every legal action against injustice.”
NLD had decided against re-registering with the Election Commission because of the junta’s exclusionary electoral laws. Just four of 10 parties that remain remaining from the 1990 election have applied to re-register with the regime’s electoral watchdog.
According to the party registration law for the 2010 election, existing parties and new parties must register before May 6. If they fail to do so, they will be dissolved.
Social work to go on without party’s name, NLD says
New Delhi (Mizzima) – The main opposition party, the National League for Democracy, will carry out social work among the people by officially registered with the authority concerned, but not in the party’s name, the party’s vice-chairman says.
National League for Democracy (NLD) vice-chairman Tin Oo told Mizzima the group would avoid using any name containing “NLD”.
“We won’t take names like Social Aid Group NLD or Legal Aid Group NLD. If we took such names … the authority concerned would not accept [registration] by accusing us of conducting party activities under these names. It would be against the law,” he said.
The party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) meeting held at party headquarters in Bahan Township today passed the resolution. It was attended by all members except party general secretary Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest, and other sick members, chairman Aung Shwe and secretary U Lwin. Committee member Lun Tin was also absent.
“We need to be registered under the existing ‘Associations Act’ in Burma … Even if we cannot register our work, we shall continue our work based on our own spirit and will”, Tin Oo said.
NLD party has decided pulled out of the elections and said it would start social work after May 6 when the party expires as a legal entity under the new electoral laws.
But members at the CEC meeting on Monday had failed to reach a decision on whether the party’s name would be used in future party social work.
Besides continuing social work assisting families of political prisoners, caring for HIV/Aids patients and providing legal aid for the redress of grievances; the party would assist other democratic forces, the party decided.
The party also decided to issue guiding directives to all party branches in States and Divisions on the party’s stance.
“We instructed our party states and division branches against voluntarily lowering our party flags and removing party signboards. And we told them to pack our belongings and destroy unnecessary party documents, to keep all financial accounts according to law and to settle all accounts before the expiry date,” Tin Oo said. “We also instructed them to settle [all matters] with the landlords of our party offices in a peaceful manner in accordance with local conditions at each and every branch.”
There are more than 300 party branches in states, divisions and townships across Burma.
ရဲစခန္းတစ္ခုအတြင္း အေသခံဗံုးေဖာက္ခဲြျခင္း၊
အမည္မသိဆုိက္ကားသမားမွ အေသခံေဖာက္ခဲြခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
ဒုရဲအုပ္တစ္ဦးေသဆံုးၿပီး၊ ရဲ (၄)ဦးဒဏ္ရာရရွိခဲ့သည္။
democracy for burma 
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