U Phe Than, one of the lawmakers from the RNDP elected for the People’s Parliament from Mraybon Township in western Burma’s Arakan State, said the move in the parliament came after U Thein Nyunt, an MP from the NMDP, proposed abolishing the Act to the parliament.

He said the proposal was turned down by 336 votes of objection, 41 votes of abstention and 8 votes of support in the parliamentary session of the 30th of August 2011.

“All MPs from our party had to abstain from voting for the proposal because it was an open voting process and was quite inconvenient for us to cast our votes for the proposal in the parliament”, said U Phe Than.

However he said that U Ba Shin, an MP from his party, had discussed showing support for the proposal, asserting that the act had been seen as just a tool for suppressing political defiance through the decades, and was not in alignment with values of the present democratic era, so therefore should be abolished.

He added that the proposal would get more support if it could be decided by the ballot system in the parliament.

Section 5 of the Emergency Provisions Act was enacted by the U Nu led regime in 1950 after two years of Burma becoming independent.

U Thein Nyunt is said to have proposed abolishing the act, pointing out that the emergency act is no longer relevant to the current democratic era, though it was crucial for ensuring national security during an earlier period when the nation was in an emergency situation due to the widespread armed insurgencies of communist factions.

He told the parliament that there is no emergency situation in the country at present, but despite this the act has been widely misused in order to suppress democracy activists in the country.