The role of development partners Throughout this period, MCRB sought to engage development partners in the digital rights agenda, via their diplomatic missions represented in Myanmar. The SWIA contained recommendations to development partners/home governments to 1. Support the strengthening of human rights, social and environmental considerations within ICT policy, legal and regulatory improvements, especially those highlighted in Recommendations 2 and 3 to the Myanmar Government. 2. Support implementation of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights by Myanmar and international companies. 3. Ensure investment and free trade agreements negotiated with the Government of Myanmar reinforce responsible business practices. However, it proved quite difficult to engage the diplomatic community and development partners on digital rights issues. The exception was the World Bank, who were generally open to ensuring that the 2014 technical assistance on telecoms sector reform took human rights into account, although this was not programmed in up front. This may reflect – at least at the time - a general lack of consideration of digital rights in the frameworks for ESG risk screening of projects by development finance institutions, even though they are increasingly making ICT investments. For example neither CDC’s ESG Toolkit, whose sectoral guidance on telecommunications nor the IFC’s EHS guidelines for the Telecommunications sector make any mention of risks to digital rights, and only cover offline risks. When these digital rights risks such as surveillance and shutdown started to materialise in Myanmar, impacting on their investee companies, some DFI investments had to rapidly consider risk management options. Lawful Interception – a missed opportunity to support better regulation From an early stage, MCRB and telecoms companies encouraged others, particularly the EU, to provide support to the Myanmar government to fill the gap and create a rights-respecting regulatory framework for lawful interception. Although telecoms companies were some of the best placed to identify effective rights-respecting LI frameworks (and the Global Network Initiative’s Country Legal Frameworks Resource is a useful compendium of national legal practices), companies believed that it would be inappropriate for the private sector to take a lead role in supporting the Myanmar government to draft laws, and that this was a role for development partners. In early 2015, at the encouragement of MCRB and companies, the Myanmar authorities made a request to the EU Delegation in Myanmar to help draft a law for the interception of communications. In response, the EU chose to piggyback on an existing EU funded Council of Europe project on Global Action on Cybercrime (GLACY). Experts from this project provided the Myanmar government in 2015 not the draft LI legislation that they had requested, but a document of ‘Generic legislative language on cybercrime and electronic evidence’. This document was based on the provisions of the 2001 Budapest Convention on cybercrime, which was already over a decade old. Furthermore, Article 15 of the Budapest Convention (Conditions and safeguards) which contains language on human rights protections was not included in the document given to the Myanmar telecoms regulator (PTD) who after consideration, concluded that it was not relevant to their request, and passed it to the (military-controlled) Home Ministry. They took no action until passing it back to the Ministry of Telecommunications several years later. A major opportunity to Sensitivity: Open