#BURMA #MYANMAR #Military #MPs #agreed #not to #amend Section #436 and Section #59 (F) in the #2008 #Constitution

Military MPs agreed not to amend Section 436 and Section 59 (F) in the 2008 Constitution – the key points that will reduce the military power as well as allow opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to contest in the presidential race.
During the discussions in Union Assembly on November 13, 21 committee members out of 31 voted against the proposed amendments. According to Brig-Gen Tint San Naing, the other five suggested wording amendments in the section.
Suggesting a change in wording, military MP Brig-Gen Khin Maung Aye said the sections concerning the military are still suitable for the current conditions.
“The Constitution has been used for just four years. We need thorough analysis before amending it,” said MP Brig-Gen Maung Maung.
“If the Constitution is amended frequently and easily, national policies will not be strong and will lead to confusion in the country’s development and national interests. So, Section 436 (A) and (B) should not be amended,” he added. CR. ELEVEN MEDIA

#Burma #Myanmar #2015 #General #Election and #whither the #commission #go?

Balanced, neutral and honorable commission, laws, by-laws, rules and regulations are the key for a free and fair election. Fairness of elections will be nothing if rules and regulations are too strict to follow though the commission is balanced and neutral and if the commission is unfair though laws and regulations are fair.
The Union Election Commission prepares its step to control electioneering of political parties, party leaders and their relying on the media for their electioneering. To look back to the beginning of the commission, we need to go back to the year 2010.
Aye-Chan-Pyo Commission
As it’s established by the State Peace and Development Council with aims to make 2010 general elections successful, it should be called Aye-Chan-Pyo Commission. It was established on March 11, 2010 in accord with Section 443 of 2008 Constitution and Section 3 of 2010 Union Election Commission Law enacted by the council.
The Union Election Commission is chaired by Thein Soe and has a membership of 17 including Myint Naing, Dr Tin Aung Aye and Aung Myint. The State Peace and Development Council allowed Deputy Chief Justice Thein Soe, Deputy Attorney General Myint Naing, Judge of the Supreme Court Dr Tin Aung Aye and Aung Myint, a member of Civil Services Board to retire on March 10, 2010.
The commission’s office was formed with a total of 200 staff members in accord with the decision made by the government’s meeting numbered 47/2010 held on December 9, 2010.
New government and new commission
The government of the ruling party “Union Solidarity and Development Party” which won a landslide victory in the 2010 election established the new commission. While it seemed a new commission, it’s formed with almost every member from the old one. So it can be said they just made a snake-skin change.
It made no significant difference as the ruling party’s chairman and the President appointed a top-ranking leader of the party as the commission’s chairman after they formed the new government. Tin Aye became the commission’s chairman on March 30, 2011. The commission under Thein Sein’s administration is no difference from the one of the SPDC. Every member of the new commission are from the old one.

BURMA MYANMAR : No plans to award 2008 charter delegates, says minister

A minister from the president’s office has said that there are no plans as of yet to confer honorary titles to delegates of the National Convention who drafted the 2008 Constitution.

Minister Soe Maung was replying to questions from Lower House MP Khin Maung Nyo of the ruling Union Solidarity and Development party at Lower House parliamentary session on February 24.

“The Section 205 of the Constitution stated that the President might confer honorary titles and awards in accord with the law… The government servants, party leaders, ethnic and public delegates who made contribution to the writing of the 2008 Constitution are now growing old. Some have found hard times in their age,” said MP Khin Maung, from the USDP.

He added that some were living with hopes that the government that will recognise them before their death. For that reason, he wanted to know if the government should confer honorary titles to all National Convention delegates who served the country from 1993 to 2007.

Parliament has formed a committee to reform the current constitution which is widely seen as a necessary next step for Myanmar’s political reforms.

The implementation committee for constitutional reform is tasked with amending the current charter six months before the 2015 elections.

International experts have pointed out that the 2008 Constitution is one of the most difficult to reform. The current law requires more than 75 percent of both houses of parliament to approve an amendment, after which it must be ratified by more than 50 percent of eligible voters in a national referendum.

NLD to contest 2015 Election even if constitution’s article 59(F) not amended

emg

 

YANGON—Myanmar’s opposition party the National League for Democracy (NLD) will contest in the 2015 Election even if the Article 59 (F) of the Constitution that bars the party’s chairperson Aung San Suu Kyi from running for presidency is not amended, NLD spokespersons told a press conference on December 28.

The response came after some media reported, quoting Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech in Tharyarwady Township, Bago Region, that the NLD party would not contest the election if the Constitution is not amended.

“I will say clearly that we must contest the 2015 Election. Since from the beginning, the NLD is determined to contest it. There is no such thing that we will contest if it’s amended and won’t if not. It has already been decided,” NLD spokesperson Nyan Win said after the party’s central committee meeting.

Another NLD spokesperson MP Win Myint explained that Aung San Suu Kyi’s words “…one shouldn’t contest the election without amending the constitution…” does not mean the NLD would not contest the election but it means the ruling party, taking the upper hand without shame, should not contest the election.

Meanwhile, the NLD has submitted their suggestion to amend 168 points in the Constitution to the parliamentary joint committee on constitutional review, Nyan Win said. One of the constitutional clauses that the NLD suggested to amend is Article 59 (F) that bars anyone whose spouse or children are overseas citizens from leading the country— a clause widely believed to be targeted at Aung San Suu Kyi whose two sons are British.

Nyan Win added that the NLD needs to have more of its members in the parliament to be able to bring about constitutional amendments. He also expressed doubts over the 2015 Election, saying that it could become a free election but not a fair one. He said the NLD will strive best to achieve greater success in 2015 than in 2012 By-Election.

The NLD party led by Noble Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi had won a landslide election in 1990, but the former junta refused to transfer power then. In 2010, the NLD boycotted the general election in protest against the 2008 Constitution. In 2012 By-Election, it contested in 44 constituencies out of the total 45, and it won in 43 constituencies.

Myanmar: People Network for Constitutional Reform ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒ ဆိုင္ရာ ျပည္သူ႕ကြန္ယက္

People Network for Constitutional Reform is scheduled to meet on 17th October 2013 at Royal Rose in Yangon, Myanmar from 1.00 pm. You are cordially invited to discuss how to deal with 2008 constitution; to amend or to abolish. And the basic principles and facts that should be included in the constitutions and those that should not be included in the constitution regardless of the fact that is amended or newly drafted. For more information please contact 09 421158936, 09 49255024, 09 31230598

http://bdcburma.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/myanmar-people-network-for-constitutional-reform-ဖ%E1%80%BCဲ%E1%82%95စည္းပံုအေ%E1%80%BBခခ/

၂၀၀၈ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံု အေျခခံဥပေဒ ကို ျပင္ဆင္ရန္ (သို႕မဟုတ္)
အသစ္ျပန္လည္ေရးဆြဲရန္ ႏွင့္ အကယ္၍ ျပင္ဆင္ခဲ့လွ်င္ (သို႕မဟုတ္)
အသစ္ျပန္လည္ေရးဆြဲခဲ့လွ်င္ မည္သည္တို႕ကို မည္ကဲ့သို႕ ျပင္ဆင္ေရးဆြဲ
(သို႕မဟုတ္) အသစ္ေရးဆြဲမည္ ဆိုသည္ကို အရပ္ဘက္ လူမႈအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား၊
ျပည္သူမ်ားအားလံုး ၀ိုင္း၀န္းေဆြးေႏြး၍ ျပည္သူ႕သေဘာထား
ထုတ္ျပန္လိုပါေသာေၾကာင့္ တက္ေရာက္ေဆြးေႏြးေပးပါရန္ ေလးစားစြာ
ဖိတ္ၾကားအပ္ပါသည္။ဖြဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒ ဆိုင္ရာ ျပည္သူ႕ကြန္ယက္
ဆက္သြယ္ရန္ – ၀၉ ၄၂၁၁၅၈၉၃၆
– ၀၉ ၄၉၂၅၅၀၂၄
-၀၉၃၁၂၃၀၅၉၈

Dear All

You are all invited to come and discuss on How to deal with 2008 constitution to amend or to abolish .

And the basic principles and facts that should be included in the
constitutions and those that should not be included in the
constitution regardless of the fact that is is amended or newly
drafted .

Political parties ,ethnic armed groups and government , Parliament are
on their own agenda on constitutional reform so that People of Myanmer
as genuine owner of the nation will discuss our own agenda on
constitutional reform

Venue . Royal Rose , Yangon

Date . 17th october 2013

Time 1.00 pm

 

Myanmar’s ruling party warns of danger in event of constitution redrawin

YANGON, Oct. 5 (Xinhua) — Myanmar’s ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) Saturday warned of grave danger and bad consequences if the 2008 constitution is abolished and redrawn.

The country and the people will suffer the consequences arising from the move, said an announcement of the party’s Constitution Amendment Committee.

Myanmar’s parliament set up a 109-member Constitution Review Joint Committee in July with the deputy speaker of the Union Parliament as chairman, and it is represented proportionally by parliament members of both Houses, political parties, military MPs and individuals.

The committee on Tuesday invited advice and suggestions from a wide range of stakeholders for review or amendment of the 2008 State Constitution, announcing that advice will be sought from the legislative, administrative and judicial pillars through parliament and those from political parties, organizations and individuals through respective parliament representatives.The committee set the deadline for Nov. 15 for submission of such advice and assessment.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/article_xinhua.aspx?id=171548

 

 

 

2008 charter dumped by Chiangmai conference

 

panglong news

The 3 day Ethnic Conference organized by the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) that ended yesterday had overwhelmingly spurned the military-drawn and adopted 2008 constitution, following a 3-hour long debate.

2008 constitution

 

Cover: Constitution of the Reputblic of the Union of Myanmar

One participant had called the 194-page composition drafted under the close guidance of the “retired” strongman Than Shwe as an attempt “to prolong the military dictatorship and keep the ethnic peoples under perpetual slavery.”

 

To a representative from the Women’s League of Burma (WLB), it is a “fearsome” document, as it was written by soldiers who uphold no respect for the womenfolks.

The resolution was to draft a new constitution, despite counsel from some that it would mark a head-on confrontation with the military.

The meeting was also like-minded on several other topics:

Commission to be formed to amend 2008 Constitution

CREDIT EMG 18.JULY 2013

Lower House Speaker Thura Shwe Mann says parliament will form a commission which will look into amending the Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution, he announced to the media on July 17.

“The commission will be inclusive of representatives from various political parties. The commission will have to make decisions on which clauses prescribed in the Constitution to be amended or cancelled or replaced following the formation of the commission,” said the Lower House Speaker.

Lower House MP Thura Aye Myint of Wetlatt Constituency had submitted a proposal to form a commission to review the constitution when it was approved after being put forward to the Union Assembly.

In response to the questions of the reporters, Thura Shwe Mann replied that the commission would represent different political parties in a proportional way. The commission would have to make decisions on which clauses prescribed in the constitution to be amended or cancelled or replaced.

Lower House MP Aung San Suu Kyi pointed out that Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution is the most difficult one in the world to be amended. In the constitution, amendments require 75 percent of MPs to vote in favour. Afterward, a national referendum must be held and more than half of eligible voters must support the constitutional amendment for it to take effect.

View this document on Scribd

 

DASSK: Myanmar’s military-drafted 2008 constitution are likely to be pushed through before the 2015 general election,

YANGON – Amendments to Myanmar’s military-drafted 2008 constitution are likely to be pushed through before the 2015 general election, democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi said on Friday.

“We will try to amend the constitution before 2015 and we hope we can do it,” Suu Kyi told a news conference.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who spent 15 years under house arrest between 1989 to 2010, became a member of parliament after she and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party won 43 out of 45 contested seats in a byelection in April, 2012.

Suu Kyi has cultivated close working relationships with Predident Thein Sein and Lower House speaker Shwe Mann, deemed the two most powerful figures in Myanmar’s still pro-military regime.

Thein Sein heads the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which is packed with ex-military men and leads the government after winning the November 2010.

“I believe the ruling party, USDP, also wants to amend the constitution because the important issues to review the charter were submitted by senior members of USDP and were approved without any disagreement,” Suu Kyi said.

The most controversial clause in the 2008 constitution gives the military establishment the right to appoint 25% of the seats in parliament, enough to veto any laws deemed detrimental to the military’s long-established control over the country.

Myanmar was ruled by a military dictatorships between 1962 to 2010.

Suu Kyi acknowledged that amending the constitution would be “difficult”. Myanmar’s next general election is scheduled for 2015.

The current charter would exclude Suu Kyi, who was married to a British national, from contesting for the presidency.

 http://www.bangkokpost.com/breakingnews/349395/?

BURMA MYANMAR : 2008 constitution amendment to start soon in Parliament -BURMESE

SOURCE STREETVIEW”၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲဲ႕စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒပါ ျပင္ဆင္ ျဖည့္စြက္ရန္ လိုအပ္ေသာ ဥပေဒမ်ားအတြက္ ေလ့လာသံုးသပ္ေရးေကာ္မတီ ေကာ္မရွင္မ်ား ဖြဲ႔စည္းေဆာင္ရြက္ေရးအဆို ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္၌ အတည္ ျပဳ”
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၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒ တြင္ပါရွိေသာ ဥပေဒမ်ားမွ ေခတ္အေျခအေနႏွင့္ အံဝင္ခြင္က်ျဖစ္မႈမရွိေတာ့ေသာ ဥပေဒမ်ားအား ျပင္ဆင္ ျဖည့္စြက္ႏိုင္ ရန္အတြက္၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒ ေလ့လာသုံးသပ္ေရးေကာ္မတီ သို႔မဟုတ္ ေကာ္မရွင္မ်ား ဖြဲ႕စည္းေဆာင္႐ြက္ေရး ျပည္သူ႕လႊတ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုလႊတ္ေတာ္သို႔ တိုက္တြန္းေၾကာင္းအဆိုကို ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္၌ အတည္ျပဳလိုက္ျပီး ျပည္ေထာင္စု လႊတ္ေတာ္ နာယကထံသို႔ သဝဏ္လႊာေပးပို႔ ေဆာင္႐ြက္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းသိရသည္။

ယင္းအဆိုအား ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ဥကၠဌမွ သူရဦးေအးျမင့္အား အေရးၾကီးအဆိုအျဖစ္ တင္သြင္းခြင့္သင့္ျပဳခဲ့ရာ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ဦးသိန္းေဇာ္က ေထာက္ခံေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ျပီး ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ အတည္ျပဳခ်က္ရယူႏိုင္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

အဆိုအေပၚျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ဥကၠဌမွ “ဖြဲ႕စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒသည္လည္း တည္ဆဲဥပေဒတစ္ရပ္ျဖစ္ၿပီး အဆိုရွင္ႏွင့္ ေထာက္ခံ ေဆြးေႏြးသူတို႔၏ ေဆြးေႏြးခ်က္မ်ားသည္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒအား အစဥ္ေလ့လာသုံးသပ္ၿပီး တိုင္းရင္းသား စည္းလုံးညီၫြတ္ေရး၊ အမ်ိဳးသားျပန္လည္သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးအတြက္ႏွင့္ လက္ရွိျဖစ္ေပၚတိုးတက္ေနေသာ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ အေျခအေနမ်ားအေပၚတြင္ လည္းေကာင္း ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၊ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ား၏ ဂုဏ္သိကၡာႏွင့္ အက်ိဳးစီးပြားအားအခါအားေလ်ာ္စြာျပင္ဆင္မႈျပဳႏိုင္ရန္အတြက္ ေကာ္မရွင္တစ္ရပ္ သို႔မဟုတ္ အဖြဲ႕ကို တိုင္းရင္းသား ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားအပါအဝင္ ပါတီစုံမွ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားပါဝင္၍ သင္‌့ေတာ္သလို ဖြဲ႕စည္းသြားေရးကို လႊတ္ေတာ္မွလည္း စနစ္တက် ဖြဲ႕စည္း ေဆာင္႐ြက္ရန္ လိုအပ္မည္ဟု ဥကၠ႒အေနျဖင့္ ယူဆေၾကာင္း” ျဖည့္စြက္ေဆြးသြားခဲ့သည္။

အဆိုတြင္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ သူရဦးေအးျမင့္က “၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပုံအ‌ေျခခံဥပေဒသည္လည္း ေရးဆြဲခဲ့စဥ္က အနာဂတ္ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ အတြက္ ေစတနာအျပည့္ႏွင့္ အဖက္ဖက္က ျပည့္စုံေအာင္ ေရးဆြဲခဲ့သည္ မွန္ေသာ္လည္း ႏိုင္ငံေရး ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈအရွိန္အဟုန္ ျမင့္မားမႈေၾကာင့္ ေခတ္ကာလအေျခအေနအခ်ိန္အခါႏွင့္ အံဝင္ဂြင္က်မျဖစ္၊ လိုက္ေလ်ာ ညီေထြမႈမျဖစ္ေတာ့ေသာ ဥပေဒအခ်က္အလက္မ်ား ရွိေကာင္းရွိေနမွာျဖစ္ပါေၾကာင္း၊ ၎အခ်က္မ်ားကို အေျခအေနအခ်ိန္အခါႏွင့္ အံဝင္ဂြင္က်၊ လိုက္ေလ်ာညီေထြျဖစ္ရန္ ျပန္လည္ေလ့လာ သုံးသပ္ရန္လိုၿပီဟု အခိုင္အမာယူဆမိပါေၾကာင္း၊ ေလ့လာသုံးသပ္ရာမွာတြင္ တစ္ဦးခ်င္း၊ တစ္ဖြဲ႕ခ်င္းလိုရာဆြဲ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ျခင္းသည္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္အတြက္ အႏၲရာယ္ႀကီးမားေသာေၾကာင့္ သင္‌့ေတာ္ ေသာ ဥပေဒပညာရွင္မ်ား၊ အသိဉာဏ္ပညာ ျပည့္ဝသူမ်ား၊ အေတြ႕အႀကဳံရင့္က်က္သူမ်ားႏွင့္ ေကာ္မတီ၊ ေကာ္မရွင္မ်ားအျဖစ္ဖြဲ႕စည္း ေဆာင္႐ြက္သင္‌့ပါေၾကာင္း၊ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ႏွင့္ ျပည္သူ႕အက်ိဳး ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္မည့္ အေျခအေနအခ်ိန္အခါႏွင့္ လိုက္ေလ်ာညီေထြျဖစ္မည့္ ဥပေဒမ်ိဳးျဖစ္ေစရန္ ေကာ္မတီ၊ ေကာ္မရွင္မ်ားမွ အဖက္ဖက္က ေလ့လာသုံးသပ္ ေဆာင္႐ြက္သင့္ပါေၾကာင္း၊” အဆိုကိုတင္သြင္းရာတြင္ ထည့္သြင္း ေျပာၾကားသြားခဲ့သည္။

ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္တြင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ေသာ အဆိုတင္သြင္းအတည္ျပဳလိုက္ျခင္းႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ျပီး အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ဧ။္ ျပည္သူလႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ဦးအုန္ၾကိဳင္က “ဒီအဆိုကို တင္သြားတဲ့သူေရာေထာက္ခံေဆြးေႏြးတဲ့သူေရာက ျပည္ေထာင္စုၾကံ့ခိုင္ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးပါတီက ျဖစ္ေနတယ္ အခုလိုအပ္ရင္ျပင္ဖို႔ ေျပာလာတာေကာင္းပါတယ္ ေရွ႔ဆက္ ဘယ္လိုျဖစ္လာမယ္ဆိုတာ မသိေသးေတာ့ သံုသပ္ဖို႔ ေစာပါေသးတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္အေနနဲ႔ကလည္း အရင္ကတည္းက ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံပေဒကို ျပင္ဆင္ဖို႔ ေျပာထားျပီးသားပါ။ ဘယ္ႏိုင္ငံမွာဆို ေခတ္နဲ႔ မေလ်ာ္ညီေတာ့တဲ့ ဥပေဒေတြကို ျပင္ရစျမဲပါ။” ဟုသံုးသပ္ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။