The Peaceful Assembly and Peaceful Procession Law regulates protest in Myanmar. The Law clearly violates the Myanma people’s rights to freedom of expression and assembly by:
- Prioritising control over rather than facilitation of protests
- Requiring protesters to overcome burdensome and bureaucratic hurdles
- Effectively making spontaneous protests unlawful
- Overly restricting the content and conduct of protests, criminalising protesters
- Giving the police vague powers – including the use of force – to stop protests based on ambiguous and merely potential risks
Recommendations
- The objectives should be changed to a presumption in favour of the rights to freedom of expression and assembly and creating a duty for the state to protect and promote these rights without discrimination.
- Specific duties of the authorities to facilitate protests should be added.
- The law should only require advance notification for protests that are likely to be large and where authorities reasonably need to plan to facilitate them.
- The list of necessary information should be reduced to just information on the date, time, location or route, estimated numbers of protesters, and contact details for any organisers.
- All requests for information on the content of the protest should be removed.
- The burden of informing authorities in different locations should be shifted from the protesters to the authorities.
- The Law should ensure a transparent and prompt process for placing prior conditions on the time, place or manner of a protest, including justifications and options for appeal.
- Authorities should be explicitly stopped from pressuring protest organisers to change their plans.
- The law should provide an exemption to notification where it is not practical or possible in the circumstances, or where there is no identifiable organiser.
- The law should remove all restrictions on the conduct and content of the protests. The only sanction should be for inciting violence.
- The law should remove powers to prevent protests from going ahead, except where there is clear evidence of an intention to incite violence.
- Authorities should be given clear duties to de-escalate protests using negotiation and communication, and dispersal should be an exceptional measure only in response to imminent incitement to violence.
- Authorities should be given clear guidelines on in which situation they can use force, ensuring legality, legitimacy, necessity and proportionality.
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