Myanmar's Military Coup d'État Is Unconstitutional

IJLLE (International Journal of Law and Legal Ethics)

Nowadays, problems in a country can be related to internal and external problems. These problems are often not included in disputes or problems between international countries but can also be problems between one country and its internal ones that threaten order and peace in the international world. One example is the case of a coup where a process of overthrowing a key government is carried out by a certain group or party, while a military coup is carried out by a group of armed forces together with the state police with the emergence of acts of violence carried out by the military against civilians. Myanmar has a history of military coups from 1962, 1988 until 2021 but this case cannot be interfered with other countries, international or regional organizations because of binding international law, this creates a polemic for all parties.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

The people of Myanmar have been living under a military dictatorship for more than 50 years, and about five years ago they achieved their dream of a partial democracy. However, on February 1, the Myanmar military staged a coup d'état again that suddenly stifled the country's democratic transition, sparking mass protests that could lead to deadly violence. The generals accused their movement of being constitutional alleging fraud in November 2020 elections about the National League for Democracy (NLD) defeat the militarybacked party. This paper is to analyze how International communities respond to a military coup in Myanmar. This paper used the reference sources used for reference in this paper are derived from reliable sources, as well as from Google Scholar and also the paper publication of national and international journals. KEYWORDS-Military coup, Perspectives of international communities I. INTRODUCTION Myanmar people had got the dream of a partially democratic country in their minds in about the last recently 5 years because they lived under the military dictatorship for over 50 years(Bhattacharya & Raghuvanshil, 2021; Chowdhury, 2021). Due to the abuse of power by successive military dictators, selfishness, the lack of patriotism, Myanmar has become an outdated country in the middle of the world(Abhinav Mehrotra, 2021). Last year, on 8th November 2020, general elections were held across Myanmar. The National League for Democracy (NLD) won an outright majority, winning 396 of the 476 seats while the military-backed party, the

Brown Journal of World Affairs, 28(1): 1-19, 2022

Myanmar is a complex country with an unlucky history that includes oppressive British colonization, Japanese invasion during World War II followed by independence, the world’s longest-running civil wars, and disastrous military coups. The coup of 1962 resulted in half a century of authoritarian military rule. The most recent coup on 1 February 2021 reversed a decade of political and economic reforms, resulted in crimes against humanity, and removed any glimmer of hope for Myanmar’s future. The terrifying trauma of a third wave of COVID-19 in mid-2021, dominated by the Delta variant, left much of the country sick and gasping for breath. Since the health system was left stricken by the February coup and its consequences, it is reasonable to lay many of the excess deaths from the COVID-19 outbreak at the feet of the military junta, on top of those—over one thousand deaths by September 2021—more directly attributed to the regime through the repression and torture of its opponents. The question then arises of what action the international community can, or should, take to minimize this suffering and pursue justice for the victims. There are a range of legal options for seeking redress through international courts, but the most extreme international response is humanitarian intervention, or military intrusion by a country or countries to protect at-risk communities. This option is typically reserved for the most egregious examples of repression or human suffering. However, this intervention has a controversial and contested history. Developing countries of the Global South have often considered it is an excuse for former imperial or colonial powers to breach their sovereignty and reimpose colonial forms of servitude, arguing that there is no basis for it in the UN Charter or international law. As a result, over the last two decades there has been a global diplomatic attempt to provide a more liberal and collaborative approach to responding to mass human suffering under the banner of “the Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). Despite being a somewhat obscure UN-supported concept, many protesters in Myanmar held up signs calling for R2P during large anti-junta demonstrations following the coup. While these calls reflected the desperation of protesters, they were in stark contrast to the demonstrations held little more than twelve months earlier against the UN, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the international community more broadly over a genocide case brought against Myanmar and its military for the massacres and repression of the long-suffering Muslim Rohingya ethnic group in 2017. The brutal repression of the Rohingya resulted in 740,000 refugees fleeing across the border to Bangladesh in a matter of months but the general population held little sympathy for the ethnic minority, believing the military’s false assertions that they were all “terrorists”. The coup has resulted in a reassessment of the treatment of the Rohingya in Myanmar, with some people now arguing that they were misled by the military. The fickle response of Myanmar’s people to potential or actual international attempts to provide redress for injustices within the country demonstrates the diplomatic high-wire act required to achieve widely accepted outcomes when engaging in acts that might undermine a state’s sovereignty. Nevertheless, the international community has a responsibility to act in cases of extreme human suffering and, within the R2P doctrine, there are a range of international legal and diplomatic responses that fall short of military intervention. It was clear, even before the coup, that the crises and suffering in Myanmar required this sort of concerted international action. Following the coup, the urgency of this response has only increased. Nevertheless, there has always been a limit to the extent that external actors can solve internal dilemmas within states. After the Cold War there was a belief in some quarters that liberal democracy would become the norm throughout the world as we reached “the end of history”. This belief was hopelessly optimistic, even at the time, and the rise of China in particular has meant that authoritarian regimes throughout Southeast Asia and beyond now have avenues of diplomatic and material support beyond liberal democratic states and their multilateral development banks. This development has severely limited the capacity of states to apply financial pressure on repressive regimes, although there are still levers that can be pulled; in the days after the coup the US froze $1 billion of Myanmar’s funds in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York after the military tried to withdraw it. Nevertheless, the shift towards a multipolar world has imposed severe constraints on the options for any actors that seek to address suffering and injustices in tyrannical states. There are three aspects of contemporary Myanmar that have caused enormous human suffering and require an international response, whether under the banner of R2P or not: ethnic conflicts including the Rohingya massacres, the military coup, and the COVID-19 outbreak. The rest of this article begins with an analysis of the concept of R2P, then investigates these three dark features of contemporary Myanmar and the current international responses. It concludes by discussing some potentially useful diplomatic actions for the international community to take within the limits that face international actors in this dire situation.

Eurasia Review, 2021

On February 1, the Myanmar military seized power from a democratically elected civilian government in what has been confirmed as a coup. It detained the de facto country leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other members of the ruling National League of Democracy party (NLD) and announced a one-year state of emergency. This move has turned Myanmar once again into a military junta regime after nine years of democratic transition, putting the future of the country in uncertainty.

Torun International Studies, 2021

The Tatmadaw's military takeover in Myanmar on the 1st of February has marked a significant step back in the country's path towards democracy. Several doubts are raised as to why the military has decided to dismiss the institutional changes that it agreed to grant the country after the Saffron Revolution of 2007 in the first place. This paper seeks to examine the current military takeover in Myanmar through the lenses of its complex post-colonial history, marked by the continuous evolution of various intra-state stakeholder's interactions, such as the Sangha, the Tatmadaw and the students. Subsequent to the historical analysis, we provide a legal outlook combing through the salient constitutional provision on the division of powers, aiming to understand if the balance thereof has been seen as an existential threat undermining the military's hegemonic position over time. Finally, we aim to offer an account on why western expectations regarding Aung San Suu Kyi as a representative of Western liberal democracy could not be factually met. We conclude that the 2007 constitution institutionalized a political system that allowed wiggle room for non-military stakeholders to obtain further democratic concessions, that could result in a significant threat to the Tatmadaw's rule. Such approach sheds outlook on the causes of the coup d'état and allows projections for the near future.

2023

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some countries experienced concurrent emergencies that intensified the social impact of the pandemic on society. This report focuses on Myanmar as an example of how the quasi-civilian and military regimes used different constitutional and legislative measures to respond to the pandemic, and the impact these measures had on society. The report provides a brief overview of emergency powers in Myanmar. The report then examines the legal measures taken during the National League for Democracy (NLD) government (2020-21) and then by the military regime after the coup from February 2021 to 2022. It finds that the NLD government avoided the use of constitutional emergency powers to prevent a military takeover, and instead used executive power under existing laws. Its approach was similar to countries in the Global South that attempted to minimise the impact of COVID-19 on the economy by limiting the scale and scope of lockdowns given the high levels of social fragility and vulnerability. In contrast, the 2021 military coup produced a concurrent emergency that led to the militarisation of emergency powers. The military claimed (incorrectly) to use constitutional emergency powers but did so for the sake of regaining control of the state. The military also used law as a weapon against political opponents, often directly contrary to the aims of reducing COVID-19, such as the widespread imprisonment of doctors and nurses. Myanmar is an example of the complexities associated with the pandemic response in military regimes and fragile or failed states.

Religions, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

JPRI Working Paper, 2009

Early last May, Cyclone Nargis made landfall near the Irrawaddy River delta in southern Myanmar. Although the country's reclusive leaders were warned of the impending disaster days before, they did little to protect millions of people who lay directly in harm's way. The cyclone tore through a large swathe of the country, took tens of thousands of lives, and put countless others in grave peril. To make matters worse, the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) restricted foreign aid and downplayed the catastrophe to protect its domestic political position. Millions went homeless, and over 100,000 people are believed to have died.[2] Many perished unnecessarily as a direct result of the junta's callous response. The cyclone crisis came on the heels of another calamity: the abortive "Saffron Revolution" of autumn 2007, during which Myanmar's armed forces (the tatmadaw) brutally repressed Buddhist monks and others engaged in peaceful demonstrations. These crises have shocked many international observers and led critics to accuse the junta of wanton disregard for human life, crimes against humanity, or even genocide.[3] Human rights groups and Burmese exiles have stepped up their calls for international humanitarian intervention and regime change, filling websites and editorial pages with invective for the SPDC and its leader, General Than Shwe. While Than Shwe and his colleagues have faced widespread condemnation, the official international response to the crises has involved considerably more bark than bite. Western governments have been acutely critical of Myanmar but have stopped well shy of coercive intervention to punish or overthrow the regime. Myanmar's key Asian neighbors have been gentler, opposing intervention or even the imposition of multilateral sanctions. Institutions like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the United Nations have had little leverage-and questionable desire-to drive hard bargains with the junta. This working paper examines some of the key political factors that have shielded General Than Shwe and his colleagues from a much tougher international response. After both the Saffron Revolution and cyclone crisis, governments in both the East and West have justified their reluctance to intervene more forcefully by invoking the norm of sovereignty. Concerns about sovereignty often do limit or delay international intervention, but sovereignty is not an impermeable shield. International actors have choices in how they interpret the norm. W hen powerful states agree on the need for dramatic change in a troubled country, they can apply a wide range of carrots and sticks to exercise their will, sometimes with and sometimes without the host government's consent. Thus, while the contorted international response to Myanmar's misbehavior results partly from the power of the norm of sovereignty, it can be explained more convincingly as a product of the contested strategic and political interest s among key states and within the relevant multilateral institutions. What Could the International Community Do? Governments and multilateral institutions have a range of tools for dealing with recalcitrant regimes like the one in Myanmar. At one end of the spectrum is non-threatening diplomacy, and at the other end is the decisive use of military force. In between is a range of bilateral and multilateral sanctions. Since 1990-when the armed forces nullified an election and put the victorious Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest-key Western governments have used economic sanctions as battering rams to compel change in Myanmar or squeeze the junta out of power. Most Asian governments have favored carrots instead of sticks, trying (at least ostensibly) to coax the junta into better behavior through economic engagement and diplomacy. Since the Saffron Revolution, and especially since Cyclone Nargis, many critics of the SPDC have pushed for broader, more debilitating multilateral sanctions. Some-including the French government-have gone further, advocating armed force to deliver aid or topple the junta. The legal and normative basis for their arguments is that the international community has a "responsibility to protect" the Burmese people from the odious governance of the junta. The JPRI Working Paper No. 114

UNISCI Journal

This article examines how ASEAN has reacted to the military coup in Myanmar. The February 1, 2021 coup was appalling because Myanmar was progressing toward democracy especially since Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory in the 2015 general election. This article shows that although ASEAN tries to adopt ‘constructive engagement’ towards Myanmar, its approaches remain ineffective because it basically still maintains the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of its member states. ASEAN must recognize that regional stability depends on respect for democracy, human rights, and rule of law within each member states. This article argues that ASEAN needs to transform its ineffective approaches toward more active response by gradually internalizing the new concept of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) and actively put pressures on the military to restore democracy in the country.

İNSAMER Analysis, 2019

The actions of the Myanmar military and government are the root cause for the Rohingya crisis. The Myanmar military’s actions are accountable as Crimes Against Humanity for their genocide and other atrocities against the Rohingyas. They have to pay for their heinous crimes. Rights groups should pressurize the Myanmar government to abrogate the 1982 Citizenship Law, which is used to render the Rohingyas stateless. Long-standing impunity for violations has emboldened the Myanmar military in perpetrating its campaign to drive Rohingyas from the country, and continued impunity will only encourage further attacks. The ICC should proceed with their investigation, which in the end could put those responsible in trial. The cycle of violence, displacement and exploitation against the Rohingyas will continue until impunity ends, root causes are addressed and rights are assured. Until then, there is a very real danger that the tragic history of the Rohingya in Myanmar will continue to repeat itself.