No Flights to a Prison State

A Global Call to Boycott Travel to Myanmar Until Prisoners Are Freed and Democracy Restored

By Alan Clements and Fergus Harlow, On behalf of the Use Your Freedom Global Campaign

This past Sunday marked five years since Myanmar’s military overthrew a democratically elected government in a pre-dawn coup, plunging the country into a spiral of violence, mass incarceration, economic collapse, and one of Asia’s gravest humanitarian crises.

Since the 2021 coup, at least 7,700 civilians have been killed, more than 30,000 people arrested, and over 22,000 remain imprisoned—many subjected to torture and fabricated charges, including the country’s civilian leaders. More than 3.6 million people have been displaced, over 113,000 homes burned, and nearly 10,000 airstrikes—many targeting schools, hospitals, religious sites, and villages—have become routine.

Inflation has surged to crippling levels, foreign currency has been seized, essential imports restricted, and daily survival rendered precarious for millions. Even as the junta stages widely rejected “elections” to launder its rule, the international community—including ASEAN—has refused to recognize their legitimacy. Myanmar today is not a democracy in crisis. It is a country ruled by terror, coercion, and impunity, systematically brutalized by its own armed forces.

This is a formal moral imperative to a world that too often mistakes freedom of movement for neutrality and tourism for innocence. We call for an immediate and universal suspension of all travel to Myanmar, also known as Burma.