Myanmar: Regulating Digital Content1 December 2017 1. Introduction The Internet provides an increasingly essential underpinning in the modern world for a range of human rights. This includes, most obviously, freedom of expression and access to information, but the Internet is also key to the realisation of such rights as freedom of association, access to education and medical services, and exercising the right to vote in an informed manner. It is widely accepted that human rights standards apply to digital communications tools. The UN Human Rights Council has noted: “[T]he same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice, in accordance with articles 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”.2 In addition, an increasing number of both international and national human rights systems have recognised that access to the Internet is a human right and that measures to restrict or deny access to the Internet therefore represent an interference with a human right. The Human Rights Council expressed this sentiment in June 2016 when it highlighted: Prepared by Portia Karegeya, Legal Officer, Centre for Law and Democracy, and Toby Mendel, Executive Director, Centre for Law and Democracy. 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/. 2 Resolution A/HRC/20/L.13, 29 June 2012. Available at: www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session20/A.HRC.20.L.13_en .doc. This was confirmed by a UN General Assembly resolution. See Resolution A/C.3/68/L.45/Rev.1, 26 November 2013. Available at: www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/C.3/68/L.45/Rev.1. 1