Myanmar: Digital Content Proposals1 January 2018 1. Introduction The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD), working with its local partner, the Myanmar Media Lawyers’ Network (MMLN), and other local organisations, has hosted a number of discussions and workshops on legal provisions in Myanmar which unduly limit freedom of expression in the digital space. Reform efforts led, in August 2017, to some procedural reforms relating to one of the most problematical and widely used provisions – section 66(d) of the 2013 Telecommunications Law – but no substantive changes to this or other provisions have so far been made. Part of the problem may have been that the campaign only focused on one of the problematical provisions, while part may have been that parliament felt uncomfortable simply repealing a provision without adopting any alternative or replacement. To address these concerns, this note sets out our initial thinking on how to amend key provisions to bring them more closely into line with international standards for three laws, namely the Official Secrets Act, 1923, the 2004 Electronic Transactions Law, and the 2013 Telecommunications Law. For each law, the note provides the existing provisions and then sets out our proposals for reform, along with a short explanation. We intend to conduct discussions among key stakeholders in Myanmar with a view to improving these proposals and making sure they are responsive to local needs. We then aim to work with local stakeholders to try to get the proposals adopted into law. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence. You are free to copy, distribute and display this work and to make derivative works, provided you give credit to Centre for Law and Democracy, do not use this work for commercial purposes and distribute any works derived from this publication under a licence identical to this one. To view a copy of this licence, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. 1