Karen Human Rights Group

Description

The Karen Human Rights Group, KHRG, is a grassroots, Karen-led human rights organization working in rural southeast Burma. It was established in 1992 and has more than thirty years of experience. KHRG is independent and unaffiliated with any political or armed group.

KHRG trains community members to document human rights abuses using a standardized reporting format, including interviews and situation updates. It translates and publishes this field research as reports, incident summaries and analysis on its website. The material is shared with local and international human rights organizations, United Nations agencies, foreign governments and embassies, academics and journalists.

The organization has documented abuses including forced labour, forced relocation, extortion, looting, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual assault and executions, committed mainly by the state military but also by ethnic armed groups and companies operating in southeast Burma. KHRG runs workshops that help villagers learn self-protection strategies and international human rights standards, and it trains soldiers from local ethnic armed groups on the rules of international humanitarian law. Its goal is to make sure villagers’ own voices and priorities reach the decision-makers who affect their lives.

KHRG has been recognized internationally, including two Nobel Peace Prize nominations in 2000 and 2001 and the Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award in 2013.