Ko Wa Lone
Ko Wa Lone is a correspondent for the Yangon bureau of Reuters news service. He was formerly a senior reporter for the Myanmar Times and joined Reuters in July 2016. He has regularly reported on military activities in northern Rakhine State. This year he jointly won an honorable mention from the Society of Publishers in Asia for his Reuters coverage of the Rakhine crisis in 2016.
Despite hopes fuelled by the overwhelming victory of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) in November 2015 parliamentary elections, which set the stage for the peaceful formation of a new government in early 2016, HRDs in Myanmar are still subjected to a range of attacks and abuses. They include extra-judicial killings and violence, discrimination, surveillance, legislative and judicial harassment, arbitrary arrest and detention, all of which continued unabated. HRDs working on civil and political rights, minority rights and economic, social, and cultural rights, including land rights, are particularly at risk of being targeted.
