The Printing and Publishing Law is a licensing law for the print media. Democracies do not licence the print media because licences are easily abused by governments. Printers and publishers are ordinary businesses and should be regulated under ordinary business laws. There is also no
UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Siracusa Principles, Principle B(iv) defines when a restriction can be said to serve national security:National security may be invoked to justify measures limiting certain rights only when they are taken to protect the existence of
When we use the term “incitement”, we are talking about speech or other acts of expression that advocate or promote hatred in a way that is intended to encourage individuals to commit acts of violence or other human rights violations against a protected group.There are
Reporting in a truthful and balanced way is an important professional goal for journalists.But freedom of expression not limited to merely truthful information.Journalists should not be compelled to publish only information whose truthfulness is ascertained.Limiting news output to only “true” or State-sanctioned news actually poses
Defamation should contain four elements. In order to be defamatory, a statement must:be false;be of a factual nature;cause damage; andthis damage must be to the reputation of the person concerned, which in turn means that the statement in question must have been read, heard.Defences include:TruthPublic
The Constitution does not fully protect the right to freedom of expression. Articles 354 (liberty of expression and publication) and 365 (freedom of artistic expression) do not comply with international standards. There are no articles protecting media freedom and the right to information.2017 updateThe NLD
The News Media Law was created partly to protect journalists in a country with no constitutional guarantee for media freedom and no government will to amend the many laws criminalising journalism. Unfortunately the law only partially protects media freedom and fails to guarantee journalists’ rights.
The Telecommunications Law was created to regulate previously blocked networks and services but keeps many undemocratic rules with a non-independent government regulator, allowing communications to be closely monitored and users to be criminalised for what they say online. The Telecommunications Law includes illegitimate criminal punishments
The NLD has announced that reforming the Penal Code is not a priority for the government, despite growing demands from civil society. အသရေဖျက်မှုကို လူတစ်ဦးတစ်ယောက်၏ အသရေကို နစ်နာစေရန် အကြံဖြင့်သော်လည်းကောင်း၊ ထိုသူ၏ အသရေကို ထိခိုက်စေမည်ဟု သိလျက်နှင့် သော်လည်းကောင်း ပြောဆိုရေးသားဖော်ပြလျှင် အသရေဖျက်မှု မြောက်ကြောင်း Find out more about freedom of expression >
The Penal Code (aka Criminal Code) includes many articles on defamation, sedition, offense, religion and incitement that were created under a colonial government and are not suitable for a democracy. The articles are so vague and broad that they are easily used to suppress debate and