Mizzima-Sept 29
NGO Human Rights Myanmar said Myanmar’s post-election government continues the military’s culture of secrecy, blocking public access to information on state finances, company ownership, court records, deaths in conflict and displacement, in a statement issued for International Right to Know Day on 28 September 2026. The contested 2025-26 elections that installed a nominally civilian administration have brought no improvement in transparency since the February 2021 coup, the statement said. It listed five categories of basic public information that citizens in most countries can access, but which remain effectively closed off in Myanmar. On public finances, the statement said citizens have no visibility into government revenues, their sources, or how they are spent. The UN Convention against Corruption requires states to run transparent budgeting, revenue and expenditure reporting, and procurement systems. The Myanmar Companies Online (MyCO) registry the state-run database of companies registered under the Myanmar Companies Law has been progressively restricted since the coup, the statement said. It said international standards increasingly demand that governments publish accurate information on the natural persons who ultimately own or control legal entities, particularly where companies hold significant assets or have relationships with public authorities.
Court records and judicial decisions are similarly inaccessible, meaning the public cannot see who has been prosecuted, on what legal basis, or what the courts decided, according to the statement. It said the UN Human Rights Committee has previously found that essential findings, evidence and legal reasoning of judgments should generally be public even where a hearing is closed. On killings since the 2021 coup, the statement said there is no official record of who has died, where and when they were killed, how, or by whom, a gap that persists even as independent groups continue to document deaths. International humanitarian law requires parties to armed conflict to keep records of the dead, including identifying details and cause of death. Information on displacement is likewise unavailable, with no accessible data on how many people have been displaced since the coup, where they are, or what assistance reaches them, the statement said. The UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement place primary responsibility for protecting internally displaced people on national authorities. The statement concluded that “a civilian government is not defined simply by the uniforms worn by those in power,” or by an election alone. It said the culture of secrecy remains intact as long as basic facts about how power is exercised are hidden from the public. Read more at:
