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Charm Tong

Asia and the Pacific Islands Human Rights
Global Leadership Awards

In 1999, Charm Tong stood before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and described the senseless murders and mass relocations strangling her home country. She was 17 years old. 

Burma’s military regime was, and still is, conducting a campaign of terror against Burma’s ethnic people in the Shan region. When Charm was six, her parents sent her to a Catholic orphanage in Thailand, where school did not pose a safety risk.  Since that day, she has shared the story of ongoing violence throughout the world. 

Charm co-founded SWAN, the Shan Women’s Action Network, which attracted global attention with its ground-breaking report, “License to Rape,” detailing how the Burmese military uses systematic rape as weapon against women and girls.

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