505A: Act of revenge Review of Myanmar coup speech ‘crimes’ The Myanmar people have used their right to freedom of expression to reject the military’s 2021 coup. The military’s responded with vengeance, including unlawfully adopting new legal provisions such as Article 505A to crackdown on dissent. This report summarises one year of monitoring and data analysis. It documents just one element of the military’s campaign of attacks on the right to freedom of expression, namely the use of the vaguely written Penal Code Articles 505 and 505A. The two articles, one written and the other amended by the military since the coup, criminalise individuals for a range of speech “crimes”. These include condemning democratic campaigning as “incitement” and prosecuting journalism as spreading false information. FEM identified 3,995 individuals who have been criminalised by arrest warrants, detentions, charges, or sentences under Articles 505 and 505A, but estimates that the military’s secrecy hides the actual number of almost 10,000. At the time of publication, of those 3,995 identified as criminalised under Articles 505 and 505A, about half remained underground or had left military-controlled areas. 1,269 were still in pre-trial detention, and 143 were sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment.