Myanmar: Analysis of Draft Cyber Security Law Introduction1 A draft Cyber Security Law (draft Law) has been circulated by the military regime which is currently governing Myanmar, following the coup d'état in early February. According to an apparently official announcement by the Ministry of Transport and Communication on 9 February 2021,2 comments on the draft are requested by 15 February 2021. This Analysis has been prepared on an urgent basis by the Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) with a view to helping local stakeholders understand the problems with the draft Law from the perspective of international human rights law. This Analysis focuses on the human rights implications of the draft Law, with a particular focus on freedom of expression and privacy. As such, it does not address a number of other potential problems such as practical challenges in implementing it or the costs involved. The Analysis also does not address the question of whether or not it is legitimate in the first place for the military regime to adopt a law along these lines, or indeed any law, a point which has been made by some commentators.3 Instead, it focuses only on the content of the draft Law. We do note, however, that for a law with profound implications for human rights, the period given for comments, of just six days, is seriously insufficient. Due to the very brief timeframe for making comments, our Analysis is based on a very rapidly completed unofficial translation of the draft Law.4 The Analysis was also completed very quickly, so as to provide inputs to local stakeholders before the end of the short period for providing comments on the draft Law. As a result, while it is based on international standards, it does not generally provide references or links to those standards. CLD is ready to provide anyone who is interested with detailed references to relevant international standards upon request. Myanmar has been discussing and working on a cyber law for quite some time now, with the support of the World Bank and the Singapore-based consulting firm, TRCP. The current draft Cyber Security Law is, however, much narrower in focus than the earlier effort and it is unclear whether and to what extent it draws on that earlier work. 1 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 the 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 Reference: 500-Has Nya/Khwe (5) license/1873, 9 February 2021. 3 See Civil Society Statement on the so-called “Cyber Security Bill”, 10 February 2021, http://freeexpressionmyanmar.org/civil-society-statement-on-the-so-called-cyber-security-bill-အာဏာသိမ်းစစ်အ/. 4 CLD takes no responsibility for any weaknesses in our Analysis which arise from errors in the translation. 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-