Two sides of women’s rightsThis week, The ASEAN Post reported on Malaysia’s increased efforts to add women to boardrooms in 2018.

Two Myanmar journalists working for an international newswire who have not been heard from since they were arrested last week should be immediately released, the EU demanded Tuesday.The sudden detention of reporters Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, who work for Reuters, has spread fears about diminishing press freedoms in Myanmar, where Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian government is under growing global pressure over human rights abuses.The two men, who have been held incommunicado since Dec

Myanmar's army says it is investigating a mass grave found in a village in northern Rakhine state, a region where the UN has accused troops of committing atrocities against Rohingya Muslims.Northern Rakhine has been nearly emptied of its Muslim population since late August, when an army crackdown on Rohingya rebels sent more than 655,000 refugees fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.

The United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning the systemic human rights violations in Myanmar against the Rohingya Muslims in the northern Rakhine State.

In the shadow of one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history, Pope Francis who is in Myanmar for a four-day visit, refrained from mentioning the word “Rohingya” throughout his speech at the capital, Naypyidaw.

Pope Francis will hold talks with Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday, a key moment of a tour aimed at soothing religious and ethnic hatreds that have driven huge numbers of Muslim Rohingya from the country.

Pope Francis plunges into a diplomatic minefield next week with visits to under-fire Myanmar and neighbouring Bangladesh amid mounting outrage over the plight of persecuted Rohingya Muslims.Some 620,000 Rohingya, more than half their total number, have fled from Myanmar's Rakhine state to Bangladesh since August as a result of violence that the UN and the United States have described as ethnic cleansing.Most of the refugees, a third of them children, have ended up in squalid refugee camp

Myanmar has agreed to take back hundreds and thousands of Muslim Rohingya refugees who’ve been sheltering in neighbouring Bangladesh, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Dhaka said in a statement.Bangladesh Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali and Myanmar’s Union Minister U Kyaw Tint Swe signed the bilateral agreement in Myanmar on Thursday, just a day after U.S.

Father William's 16-strong flock on Myanmar's eastern border is one of the Catholic Church's tiniest outposts, but next week they will join a tide of 200,000 faithful in Yangon for a historic mass led by Pope Francis.The Pope, renowned for powerful entreaties for peace no matter how highly-charged the issue, arrives on Monday in a country on the defensive over its treatment of the Rohingya Muslim minority.Some 620,000 Rohingya have been driven from western Rakhine state to Bang

Myanmar troops gang-raped countless Rohingya women and girls during a military campaign that sent hundreds of thousands fleeing across the border to Bangladesh, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.The US-based rights group said in a report that the sexual violence, along with other atrocities committed by Myanmar security forces, amount to crimes against humanity.Based on interviews with rape survivors, aid organisations and Bangladeshi health officials, the report details cases of what it calle