Privacy violations and discrimination in Myanmar

Summary

Since the 2021 coup, the military has weaponised digital tools to dismantle privacy and target marginalised groups. This submission to the UN High Commissioner documents discriminatory surveillance practices—such as data retention, SIM registration, VPN blocks, and facial recognition—and calls for urgent international action to expose, sanction, and end the military’s deliberate strategy of digital repression and exclusion.

Since the 2021 coup, the military has swiftly turned digital technologies into instruments of repression, systematically collecting and processing personal data to carry out mass surveillance, identify dissent, and crush opposition movements. The military’s violations of the right to privacy also strengthen existing inequalities and enable discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities, women, LGBTIQ+ communities, persons with disabilities, older persons, and other marginalised groups.

Human Rights Myanmar submits this report on the situation in Myanmar to the UN High Commissioner’s global review of discrimination and unequal enjoyment of the right to privacy, under Human Rights Council Resolution 54/21.

Privacy and data protection in Myanmar

Myanmar’s military has demolished any semblance of legal or institutional safeguards for privacy since seizing power in 2021. Although the 2008 Constitution nominally guarantees privacy of “home, property, correspondence and other communications,” no comprehensive data protection law exists, and authorities routinely override any residual protections.

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