2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(2) Canberra, in the Commonwealth of Australia (‘Australia’) sent seven documents to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Australia, stating that the SAC had declared the passports of about 70 people null and void, even though it was not certain all the people in question were outside of Myanmar at that time of notification, let alone in Australia.11 Further, even if any of the targeted people were in Australia, it was unclear if they had left Myanmar permanently and/or had acquired Australian citizenship and passports. In issuing denationalisation orders in March and April 2022, the SAC did not provide any evidence of the 33 people having met the conditions of leaving permanently or acquiring other citizenship, which was required for stripping them of Myanmar citizenship. One could argue that the use of the 1982 Law by the SAC in this case was impulsive and arbitrary. ‘ANTI-TERRORISM’ LAWFARE AGAINST RESISTANCE IN MYANMAR The Myanmar military overthrew the democratically elected and re-elected 12 National League for Democracy (‘NLD’) party government on 1 February 2021 in a coup a few hours before the new parliament convened. Most, if not all, of the NLD leadership, including President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, were detained. A few days later, hundreds of thousands of Myanmar people, including elected NLD representatives, activists and other dissidents, took to the streets in protest against the coup. This included a general strike of public sector employees, called the Civil Disobedience Movement (‘CDM’)13 that aimed to paralyse the bureaucracy. The protests and the CDM came to be known as the Spring Revolution and the Revolution became an armed resistance on 5 May 2021, declaring a war of self-defence on 7 September 2021. 11 12 13 Stephen Dziedzic, ‘Myanmar Junta Cancels Passports of High-Profile Opponents and Shadow Government Figures, Documents Show’, ABC News (online, 2 December 2021) <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-03/myanmar-junta-cancels-passports-of-highprofile-opponents/100669294>, archived at <https://perma.cc/64C2-AM43>. Within Myanmar, citizens have to produce their national IDs, known as Citizenship Scrutiny Cards, as proof of evidence of citizenship, but it is passports that are evidence of Myanmar nationality for people outside the country. Hence, declaring passports of Myanmar citizens null and void is effectively denationalisation. The National League for Democracy (‘NLD’) won both general elections held in November 2015 and November 2020 in a landslide. Although the military did not dispute the result of the 2015 elections, it alleged that there was huge systemic fraud in the 2020 elections, in spite of international and local independent observers’ conclusions that the polls were free and fair to a satisfactory level: see, eg, PACE Myanmar, 2020 Global Elections Observation Report (Report, 16 March 2020); Asian Network for Free Elections, The 2020 Myanmar General Elections: Democracy Under Attack (Report, 2021). On a broader understanding, boycotts of goods and services produced by military-owned and linked enterprises by ordinary citizens, who are neither public servants nor private sector employees, also form part of the Civil Disobedience Movement (‘CDM’). In the early days of the CDM, several thousand employees of enterprises and businesses in the private sector also joined the CDM. However, public servants are the core of the CDM. 282