Myanmar: Analysis of the Organisation Registration Law Introduction1 On 28 October 2022, Myanmar’s State Administration Council (SAC), a military creation acting as a governing body since the February 2021 coup in Myanmar, issued a new Organisation Registration Law (NGO Law). 2 The NGO Law imposes registration requirements and otherwise regulates non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in Myanmar. While some rumours of a new NGO law preceded this announcement, the NGO Law was enacted without any apparent discussion or consultation with civil society. The NGO Law, which came into effect in late December 2022, will have a serious harmful impact on civil society in Myanmar, which has already suffered sustained attacks since the 2021 coup. As described in this Analysis, it renders the work of many NGOs unlawful unless they comply with burdensome registration and monitoring requirements, and introduces the threat of administrative and criminal sanctions for non-compliance. The new restrictions will impact all sectors of civil society, with potentially deadly consequences. Humanitarian needs in Myanmar today are acute. Half of the population is living in poverty and almost one out of three people is expected to need humanitarian assistance in 2023. Another 1.4 million people are forecast to become internally displaced in 2023, more than the 1.3 million existing displaced persons.3 Many crucial State services are not operating – the public health system is in “near total collapse” – meaning that civil society is providing vital support.4 The NGO Law will also engender additional harassment of any organisations deemed to be politically active, critical of the military or supportive of opposition movements. It may result in greater restrictions on ethnic civil society groups or those operating in regions with active armed conflict. The NGO Law represents a further closing of space for non-violent political opposition and debate in Myanmar, limiting avenues for peaceful expressions of opposition. 1 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-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/. 2 State Administration Council Law No. 46/2022. This Analysis relies on the translation published in segments in the Global New Light of Myanmar from 29 October 2022 to 5 November 2022 (GNLM Translation). CLD has consolidated this translation into a single document available at: https://www.law-democracy.org/live/wpcontent/uploads/2023/06/Myanmar-Organization-Registration-Law-consolidated-English-version.pdf. Because this translation appears to contain several errors or hard-to-understand phrases, CLD has also referred to an alternate translation available at https://bit.ly/3jJIJy3 (Lincoln Translation). Discrepancies in the translations are noted in footnotes throughout this Analysis. 3 UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, p. 92, https://reliefweb.int/attachments/f0cc9858-071b4583-bcfe-e2dc2c288f7b/mmr_humanitarian_needs_overview_2023%20final.pdf; Reliefweb, “Myanmar Humanitarian Update No. 26”, 2 February 2023, https://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/myanmar-humanitarian-updateno-26-2-february-2023. 4 Ibid., p. 22. The Centre for Law and Democracy is a non-profit human rights organisation working internationally to provide legal expertise on foundational rights for democracy. 1