FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE
AHRC-PRL-016-2009

BURMA: AHRC launches new Burmese-language blog

(Hong Kong, March 10, 2008) The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) on Tuesday launched a new Burmese-language human rights web blog.

The AHRC has set up the blog to cover a range of current affairs and issues on Burma to a Burmese-language audience.

"In the last few years the amount of Burmese-language material on the net has increased dramatically, and the number of Internet users inside the country is now in the hundreds of thousands, which is a big change from before," Basil Fernando, director of the Hong Kong-based regional rights group, said.

"Of all countries in Asia, Burma's human rights situation is among the most pressing, and dedicated human rights sites in Burmese are still relatively few," Fernando said.

"We're glad to get more involved with the Burmese-language readership and hope that the site will be interesting and useful, and look forward to comments and interaction with readers through the site," he added.

The site so far includes transcriptions of radio broadcasts on a variety of issues on which the AHRC Burma desk staff have worked. Over time these will be supplemented with commentaries, translated articles on human rights issues in other countries of Asia of relevance to Burma, and other useful material.

Readers also are invited to make suggestions by leaving comments on the blog page itself or by sending emails to: burma@ahrc.asia.

The blog is using the new Unicode format for Burmese and should be readable from any computer in Firefox or Explorer browsers when the font available on the page is downloaded.

Blog URL: http://ahrcburmese.blogspot.com/ 

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About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.