A group of civil society organisations in Myanmar plans to take legal action against Norwegian telecoms company Telenor, accusing it of passing customer data to the military authorities that seized power after the 2021 coup. The activists sent Telenor a notice of intent to sue on Monday, according to the Netherlands-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, which is backing the case. Their central claim is that the data disclosures helped the military trace and target civilians during its campaign of repression.
The lawsuit notice says information shared by Telenor was used by the military to identify anti-coup activists, some of whom were later tortured in detention and one of whom was executed. One claimant, Thazin Nyunt Aung, said she was shocked by the disclosures because they came weeks before her husband, lawmaker Phoe Zeya Thaw, was arrested and executed. Another claimant, Ko Ye, said she felt betrayed by a company she had trusted. Those remarks show why this case is about more than corporate policy; it is about personal exposure and the consequences of data leaving a communications network and entering a security apparatus.
Telenor responded that the legal notice raises issues it believes have already been addressed in previous police and court investigations in Norway. The company said it faced a terrible and tragic situation in Myanmar after the coup and had no good options, because refusal to comply with the military authorities could have been treated as terrorism or sabotage and put employees in immediate danger. It also said that, like any operator, Telenor Myanmar was legally required to provide traffic data to the authorities.
The claimants and their lawyer reject that justification. Jan Magne Langseth, who represents them, said Telenor should never have handed over the information and should have deleted sensitive data before exiting the country. The case also focuses on Telenor's 2021 sale of its Myanmar business to Lebanese investment firm M1 Group and majority owner Shwe Byain Phyu, a local conglomerate whose chairman has military ties. The activists argue that the sale gave the military unfettered access to customer data.
Myanmar has been in deep crisis since the coup and the military crackdown that followed, with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners saying the regime has killed almost 7,000 people and arrested close to 30,000. Against that backdrop, a telecom-data lawsuit becomes part of a larger story about how repression can depend on the infrastructure of modern communications. The legal fight is therefore not just about what Telenor knew or did; it is also about what duties a company owes to users when the state itself becomes the threat.
The notice of intent does not settle the facts. It does, however, show that Myanmar activists are prepared to turn the issue into a legal test case about corporate responsibility, data handling and complicity in state violence. If the suit proceeds, it will ask how far a telecom company can go in arguing that it was trapped by events when those events helped determine who the military could find.
