On 12 November in London, Ko Ye Lin Myint, Chairperson of the Justice and Accountability Initiative (JAI), will receive the 2026 Magnitsky Human Rights Award for Outstanding Legal Contribution to Human Rights. For those of us who have worked beside him, it is welcome news. But what the award honors is bigger than one evening in London: the conviction that people from Myanmar, even under military rule, can call for accountability for multinational corporations if they violate human rights or lend support to the junta.
“This award is much bigger than me,” he said when it was announced, crediting the victims and survivors, civil society groups, supporters, and lawyers who stood with him, and dedicating it to the people of Myanmar who have suffered the junta’s violence. We take him at his word. This is a tribute to him, and to the shared effort his work has made possible.
From transparency to accountability
Long before Ko Ye took a landmark case against Telenor before a Norwegian court, he spent years pushing for more transparency in Myanmar’s natural resource sector. From 2016 to 2020, he served as Head of the Secretariat of the Myanmar Alliance for Transparency and Accountability (MATA), a national network of more than 450 civil society groups and individuals from every state and region in Myanmar. Through MATA, he represented civil society in Myanmar’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), pressing for public information about who profits from the country’s oil, gas, and minerals, and for affected communities’ voices to be heard.
That space closed with the February 2021 coup, and Myanmar was suspended from the EITI. Ko Ye did not step back. He turned to a harder question: when a foreign company leaves a country under military rule, who answers for how it leaves and what it leaves behind?
Holding companies to account where they are based
In Myanmar, business and human rights are always connected. Mines, pipelines, plantations, and telecoms networks operate in the middle of armed conflict and repression. Since the coup, Myanmar’s own courts offer no realistic path to remedy. The countries where companies are headquartered, their complaint mechanisms, their courts, have become one of the few routes left. Ko Ye has spent the past five years banging on their doors.
In September 2021, MATA joined Publish What You Pay Australia and the Bawdwin Labour Union in a complaint to the Australian National Contact Point (NCP) under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Brought on behalf of 245 Myanmar civil society organisations, it challenged Myanmar Metals’ exit from the Bawdwin mine in northern Shan State. In August 2023, the NCP’s final statement largely upheld the complaint, finding that the company had not carried out human rights due diligence.
The Telenor case followed the same logic on a larger scale. After the coup, the Norwegian telecom company announced it would sell Telenor Myanmar, a network serving more than 18 million customers, to a buyer with a history of business links to the military, putting customers’ personal data at risk. Ko Ye was instrumental in bringing together 474 Myanmar civil society organisations, which filed a complaint with Norway’s NCP with the help of Dutch organisation SOMO in July 2021. Every one of those organisations had to remain anonymous for safety.
The process took more than four years. On 11 December 2025, the Norwegian NCP found that Telenor had failed to carry out adequate human rights due diligence and recommended that it take part in remediation. Telenor disagrees with several of the conclusions.
An NCP cannot order compensation. So Ko Ye went further. He founded JAI in Sweden, and on 8 April 2026, JAI filed a class action suit against Telenor ASA before the Asker and Bærum District Court in Norway, supported by SOMO and the Open Society Justice Initiative. The suit seeks damages for Myanmar customers whose data was allegedly shared with the military, at least 1,253 phone numbers, according to the plaintiffs, including that of Mr Zeya Thaw, a prominent rapper and lawmaker, who was then detained and executed. Telenor contests the claims, and the case is ongoing.
“Due diligence” can sound abstract until you think about the people whose call records and location data ended up in the hands of a military that targets its critics. That’s what makes this work matter. It raises a question that reaches far beyond Myanmar: when a company claims to respect human rights and is based in a democracy that claims to protect them, can people harmed by that company seek justice in that country’s courts? They should be able to.
Leadership and friendship
The number 474 says something about how Ko Ye leads. He did not pursue Telenor as a lone litigant. He brought hundreds of organisations into a shared position, each carrying its own risk, and helped hold that coalition together through four years of process in a foreign capital.
Much of that leadership is invisible: the conversations that build trust among groups who cannot be named; explaining an OECD procedure to communities, and Myanmar’s realities to officials in Oslo and Canberra; staying principled when no settlement is on offer. He has also been clear about whose struggle this is; victims, survivors, civil society, international supporters, and legal experts, whom he credits before himself.
At EarthRights International, we know Ko Ye as a partner and a friend. We share his belief that companies must answer for the harm their business causes, and that the people affected must shape how remedy is pursued.
“We honor Ko Ye for this well-deserved and long-overdue recognition. For over fifteen years, he has inspired us with his leadership, strategic mind, and persistent belief that justice and accountability are possible and that our work matters. We know that Ko Ye’s Magnitsky Award will fuel more justice and accountability initiatives, and we will be with him until Myanmar people are free,” said Bobbie Sta. Maria, EarthRights International Executive Director.
What this recognition means for Myanmar
Ko Ye is only the second person from Myanmar to receive a Magnitsky Award, after the activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi in 2022. The award puts Myanmar’s demand for accountability before an international audience at a time when the world’s attention has drifted even as the junta escalates its efforts to seek legitimacy, continuing to target civilians with airstrikes.
An award does not decide a case, protect a complainant, or return what was lost. Accountability in Myanmar will be built, as it has been so far, by communities, lawyers, researchers and human rights defenders working together, often at great personal risk. But recognition matters. It tells companies that their conduct in conflict and under dictatorship will be examined. And it tells Myanmar’s human rights movement that taking on even the most powerful corporations is legitimate, and worth supporting.
“When Myanmar’s courts closed their doors after the coup, Ko Ye took the fight for justice to the countries where the companies are based. He did it with 474 organizations standing alongside him. This award honours his courage and the solidarity that made the work possible. It also sends a message to every company operating in conflict and under dictatorship that its choices will be examined, and that the people harmed will not stay silent.” ~ Bo Bo, Myanmar Program Director
To Ko Ye
Congratulations, Ko Ye. Thank you for the years of patient, difficult work this award recognizes, and for the many people you have brought into it. Thank you for your friendship and your trust. The road ahead is long; the case in Norway continues, and so does the struggle at home. EarthRights International will keep walking it with you, and with everyone in Myanmar who still believes the law can be made to serve justice.