Justice and Accountability Initiative v. Telenor ASA

On February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military toppled the country’s democratically elected government. In the aftermath of the coup, a civil resistance movement was born. The military immediately started cracking down on these activists through widespread arbitrary arrests and detentions, extrajudicial killings, torture, and other forms of serious human rights violations. A civil war between the military junta and forces supporting the opposition is still ongoing.

During this time, Telenor ASA, a Norwegian telecommunications company that had operated in Myanmar since 2014, was serving over 18 million customers, until it sold its Myanmar subsidiary in March 2022.

Between the time the coup took place and Telenor ASA’s exit from Myanmar, the military regularly requested Telenor Myanmar to disclose specific user data. In particular, the military requested the data of customers who were suspected of opposing the coup, which the subsidiary handed over. Information Telenor gathered and stored about its customers included: names, physical addresses, Facebook and bank accounts, e-wallets, ID-numbers, location data, and call logs.

Despite knowing about the risk of human rights violations that were systematically inflicted by the military, Telenor ASA did not prevent the sharing of sensitive data in any of these cases. For some of them, the parent company explicitly recommended compliance with the requests. The data pertaining to at least 1,253 phone numbers was shared.

On April 8, 2026, Justice and Accountability Initiative with the support of SOMO and the Open Society Justice Initiative filed a class action suit against Telenor ASA in Norwegian courts claiming damages for all customers whose data was shared. Among them were Mr. Zeya Thaw and Mr. Aung Thu who were subjected to serious human rights abuses after their data was handed over to the military.

On October 31, 2021, the Myanmar military requested the logs of a phone number owned by Mr. Zeya Thaw, a prominent rapper and lawmaker. After informing Telenor ASA that the request had been made and was going to be complied with, Telenor Myanmar handed over the requested data, even though an internal assessment disclosed that doing so would likely lead to his arrest and affect his right to safety, security, and freedom of expression. On November 18, 2021, Zeya Thaw was arrested by the military in Yangon. He was convicted in a closed trial and sentenced to death in January 2022. On July 25, 2022, his widow, Tha Zin, read in the newspaper that he had been executed by hanging. She has taken up the case for her husband.

On September 5, 2021, Aung Thu, a civil society activist, was arrested and charged with sedition, but his case was withdrawn, and he was set to be released. However, on September 22, 2021, the military requested his user data. After escalating the request to the parent company, Telenor Myanmar complied with the request, even though an internal assessment found that complying with the request would infringe on internationally recognized human rights. As he was set to be released on October 17, 2021, Aung Thu was re-arrested at the prison gate. This time, he was charged with terrorism laws and sentenced to five years in prison following a secretive and arbitrary trial. It is likely that the military relied on the shared phone data to convict him in the second proceedings. He was released in 2025 after serving two-thirds of his sentence.

The lawsuit argues that Telenor is liable for 9,000 EUR in damages per customer whose data was shared because the company either did not prevent disclosure or knowingly and unlawfully authorized the disclosure of their customer data by its subsidiary without taking sufficient measures to prevent its misuse.