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Defying a Dictatorship

March 17, 2026/in ND-Burma's Reports, Periodic Report

Defying a Dictatorship An Overview of the Human Rights Situation in Burma: July-December 2025 The Network for Human Rights Documentation-Burma (ND-Burma) is deeply grateful to the interviewees for their courage in speaking out against the violations committed against them. We also appreciate our member organizations and fieldworkers, who continue to gather invaluable testimonies at their […]

Open Letter: The UNHRC Must Reject the Junta’s Sham Election Results to ConsolidateIllegitimate Rule and Advance Accountability

February 24, 2026/in Press Releases and Statements

Defying a Dictatorship

March 17, 2026/in ND-Burma's Reports, Periodic Report

Open Letter: The UNHRC Must Reject the Junta’s Sham Election Results to ConsolidateIllegitimate Rule and Advance Accountability

February 24, 2026/in Press Releases and Statements

To: Member and Observer States of the UN Human Rights Council
CC: UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar
18 February 2026
Open Letter: The UNHRC Must Reject the Junta’s Sham Election Results to Consolidate
Illegitimate Rule and Advance Accountability
Excellencies,
We, the undersigned 235 Myanmar, regional, and international civil society organizations, urge
the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to take decisive, principled, concrete and
time-bound action to protect the rights and dignity of the people of Myanmar. As the Council
considers its 2026 resolution on Myanmar, we call for the adoption of a robust resolution that:

Responds effectively to the escalating human rights and humanitarian catastrophe;
Unequivocally rejects the military junta’s attempts to seize legitimacy through a sham
electoral process conducted under the military-drafted 2008 Constitution and refuses
recognition of any outcomes or governance structures arising from it;
Impedes the junta’s capacity to carry out airstrikes and other atrocity crimes, including
through measures that restrict access to aviation fuel, arms, and dual-use technologies;
Addresses transnational organized crimes and the criminal economies (or illicit financial
networks) that enable the junta to continue its terror campaign; and
Advances accountability through all available international legal avenues.

Excellencies,
The Myanmar crisis is the direct consequence of the military’s attempted coup in February 2021
and its subsequent campaign of systematic violence to unlawfully seize and consolidate power
against the will of the people. Since then, the military junta has deliberately applied terror and
repression with total impunity.
Over the past five years, the Myanmar military junta has waged a sustained campaign of terror
attacks against civilians, marked by widespread and systematic violations of international human
rights and humanitarian law. These abuses include indiscriminate airstrikes and shelling,
massacres, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture, conflict-related sexual
violence, and mass arbitrary arrest and detention. Since February 2021, at least 30,476 political
prisoners have been arrested, 22,780 of whom remain detained, while 7,804 people have been
killed. Documentation records at least 501 massacres, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths.

Hundreds of thousands of civilian homes and public buildings have been deliberately destroyed,
often through coordinated arson and airstrikes, especially in Sagaing, Magway and Tanintharyi
Regions and Chin, Karenni, Karen, and Rakhine States. The junta has carried out 9,794 aerial
bombardments, including 7,330 airstrikes, 1,305 drone strikes, 820 paramotor attacks, and 339
gyrocopter assaults. These aerial attacks have resulted in 4,853 documented deaths. Since 2022,
approximately 1,853 healthcare facilities have been attacked. IDP camps, schools, places of
worship, and public gatherings are repeatedly targeted.

On 10 December 2025, International Human Rights Day, the military conducted airstrike on
Mrauk-U Hospital in Rakhine State, killing approximately 34 people and injuring more than ten.
In January 2026 alone, 633 human rights violations were documented, alongside 220 aerial
bombardments that killed at least 69 civilians. Two major massacres occurred between 21 and
25 January: in Bhamo Township, Kachin State, at least 27 people were killed during a funeral and
wedding; in Kyauktaw Township, Rakhine State, at least 21 people, including pregnant women
and children, were killed. In February 2026, further airstrikes targeted displaced civilians in
Sagaing Region, killing monastic novices, children, and villagers.

More than 3.6 million people are internally displaced, while acute food insecurity has continued
at catastrophic levels, affecting an estimated 12.4 million people in 2026. The junta’s attacks on
civilian population are deliberate. They form part of a widespread and systematic pattern that
amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity including war crime of starvation of
civilians. The Council must adopt urgent accountability and civilian protection measures.
In addition, Myanmar has become a regional hub for transnational criminal activities. The
proliferation of cyber-scam centers, human trafficking networks, and illicit narcotics production
has accelerated, particularly in areas under the control of the junta and junta-aligned armed
groups, militias, and military-linked business networks. These criminal economies generate
revenue streams for the junta and actors connected to it, helping the military evade and
withstand international sanctions.

The consequences of these crimes extend far beyond Myanmar’s borders and have directly
affected neighboring ASEAN countries as well as the United States and Europe. Victims—often
trafficked individuals—are subjected to forced labor, detention, torture, and other serious
abuses that may amount to crimes against humanity, including enslavement and imprisonment.
The symbiotic relationship between the military junta and transnational organized crimes is now
a central feature of its survival strategy and must be explicitly addressed by the UNHRC and the
international community.

In stark contrast to the junta’s violence, the people of Myanmar have continued to organize,
resist, and build alternative political and social systems under extraordinary risks. Civil society
organizations, human rights defenders, women, youth and LGBTIQA+ activists, and democratic
resistance groups have established people-led governance from the ground up, challenging the
military-constructed, centralized, repressive state system and exclusionary nationalism. Through
survivor-centered documentation, rights-based advocacy, community education, mutual aid, and
local administration, communities are actively shaping a different political landscape that seeks
to ensure a peaceful and sustainable future based on principles of human rights, justice, and
federal democracy.

Against this backdrop, the junta attempted to manufacture political legitimacy through a
systematically coerced and tightly controlled process. The military junta weaponized the entire
electoral system—deploying the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party
(USDP), mobilizing pro-junta networks, and relying on fear, intimidation, and force—to impose a
predetermined outcome. This carefully stage-managed process was falsely presented as a
“return to democracy,” a narrative decisively rejected by the people of Myanmar. The election
was neither legal nor legitimate. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights publicly affirmed
that the military-imposed elections failed to respect fundamental human rights and only
deepened violence and societal polarization.

The junta-controlled Union Election Commission (UEC) functioned as a direct instrument of
military command, seeking to fabricate consent through surveillance, exclusion, and coercion.
The three-phase election, held between December 2025 and January 2026, unfolded amid the
widespread public boycott and junta’s heavy militarization and collapsing territorial control.
Polling stations were largely empty, with participation limited to pro-military supporters or
individuals coerced through threats of arrest, economic punishment, or pressure on family
members. Electoral secrecy and voluntariness were systematically dismantled through
surveillance, forced advance voting, and arrests under so-called election protection laws, under
which at least 404 people—324 men and 80 women—were detained. In addition, the junta’s
sham election took place amid ongoing massacres and airstrikes. The Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) documented and reported that at least 170 people
were killed in more than 408 military aerial attacks during the voting period between December
2025 and January 2026.

While we acknowledge the UNHRC resolution adopted on 4 April 2025, the crisis—now entering
its sixth year—demands far stronger, more concrete, and time-bound actions from UN
mechanisms and the international community.
The UNHRC must unequivocally reject the sham election and its outcomes and make clear that
no UN mechanism will recognize or engage with any governance structures arising from it. Any
recognition, engagement, or technical cooperation that confers political legitimacy on the junta,
including in the aftermath of its sham election, risks normalizing the junta’s atrocity crimes and
further emboldening it.

The Council must explicitly recognize and address the symbiotic relationship between the
Myanmar military and transnational organized crimes and call for coordinated international
action to dismantle these networks and cut off a key source of financing for the military.

We further urge the Council to call for a comprehensive global arms embargo, including targeted
sanctions on aviation fuel, cutting the financial flows that sustain the military’s decades-long
impunity. Any sale, supply, or transfer of weapons, aircraft, drones, or fuel directly facilitates
atrocity crimes and may therefore give rise to state and individual responsibility for aiding and
abetting the Myanmar military’s crimes under international law.

The Council must also mobilize political support for concrete accountability measures, including
the referral of the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or the
establishment of an ad hoc or hybrid international criminal tribunal. We urge the Council to
actively support the NUG’s declaration under Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute, accepting ICC
jurisdiction, and to increase support for cases under the principles of universal jurisdiction,
including those pursued in Argentina, Timor-Leste, and other national courts.
Finally, the UN must move beyond reliance on ASEAN’s failed Five-Point Consensus and adopt an
approach that support a Myanmar people-led, rights-based solution grounded in international
law, justice, and accountability.

Excellencies,
We urge you to support the people of Myanmar in their unwavering resistance against the
criminal military junta and tireless efforts to build a federal democracy from the ground up,
despite immense suffering. We urge the Council to match their courage with decisive action—by
rejecting the junta’s sham election and its results, dismantling the military’s capacity to continue
committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other international crimes, and advancing
accountability without delay.
For further information, please contact: