Myanmar: Election Fundamentally Flawed
Myanmar’s electoral process is undermined by systemic problems and rights abuses that will deprive people of their right to fairly elect their government, Human Rights Watch said today. Parliamentary, state, and local elections are scheduled for November 8, 2020.
The national elections will be Myanmar’s first since 2015, which resulted in a landslide victory for the National League for Democracy (NLD), and the second contested election since 1990, when the military annulled the NLD’s overwhelming victory. Electoral problems include discriminatory citizenship and other laws that bar most Rohingya Muslim voters and candidates; reservation of 25 percent of parliamentary seats for the military; criminal prosecutions of government critics; unequal party access to government media; and the lack of an independent election commission and complaints resolution mechanism.
