THE ADVOCATE 409
VOL. 79 PART 3 MAY 2021
UVIC LAW
FACULTY NEWS
By Jeremy Webber*
DEFENDING DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR
By Jeremy Webber*
As I write, the military regime in Myanmar (also known as Burma) is seeking
to repress, with great violence, demonstrations against their coup d’état.
The cost in lives is mounting. Whatever happens, the current military leaders
are proving, beyond redemption, that they hold their own people in contempt.
The people are responding with courage. They clearly will not
surrender their democracy without a struggle. Their bravery and their
resolve inspire great admiration.
As individuals, even as individual scholars, it often seems as though we
can do little more, when a military regime exercises this degree of violent
oppression, than reaffirm those values and express our solidarity with the
people affected. That sense of solidarity is acute among many at UVic Law.
We have important and treasured links, built over the last decade, to the
people of Myanmar.
One of those connections took the form of a series of workshops delivered
in Myanmar in the lead-up to the 2015 election in which the National
League for Democracy (“NLD”), Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, won a huge
majority of the seats up for election and went on to form Myanmar’s first
democratically elected government. The first of these workshops was held
in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) in May 2013. The program was organized
and delivered by a distinguished group of Australian constitutional scholars,
led by Wojciech Sadurski, Challis Professor of Jurisprudence at the University
of Sydney, and, for subsequent workshops, by Martin Krygier, Gordon
* Jeremy Webber is the dean of the UVic Faculty of Law.