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.

This call is not symbolic. It is not protest theater. It is a coordinated act of global solidarity grounded in the oldest principle of nonviolent resistance: the withdrawal of consent from injustice.

Myanmar is not a destination. It is a prison state. The country is held hostage by a military junta that overturned a democratic election, imprisoned a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and continues to rule through fear. Entire communities have been erased by arson campaigns. Refugees fleeing airstrikes have been massacred. Detainees have been used as human shields. Narcotics trafficking and organized criminal enterprises flourish under military protection. Terror is not an aberration of governance; it is the method.

Every tourist dollar feeds a system of repression. Every visa issued without protest launders crime. Every glossy travel listing that treats Myanmar as normal erases lives lived behind bars and beneath airstrikes. Neutrality, in this context, is not impartiality. It is participation.

We are therefore asking the world to withdraw consent—clearly, publicly, and persistently.

For travel agents, this means suspending the promotion and sale of itineraries to Myanmar and issuing explicit public statements explaining why. For airlines and booking platforms, it means halting routes, codeshares, and marketing that present the country as safe or routine. For embassies and governments, it means refusing to facilitate leisure travel and advising against nonessential visits as a matter of human rights.

For policymakers and faith leaders, it means naming the injustice without euphemism. Silence, in moments like this, is alignment. For influencers, artists, writers, and cultural figures, it means refusing to aestheticize suffering or convert oppression into content. For journalists and editors, it means abandoning soft framing and calling reality by its name: a nation under military terror.

This boycott applies universally. It applies to all nationalities, all passports, and all institutions. Complicity thrives in complexity. Justice requires clarity.

What can individuals do now? Refuse travel to Myanmar until political prisoners are released and civilian rule is restored. Declare that refusal publicly. Amplify it relentlessly across classrooms, communities, professional associations, cultural spaces, and social media. Pressure the institutions you belong to—universities, NGOs, companies, unions, arts organizations, and faith communities—to adopt the boycott formally and visibly.

This is how nonviolent pressure works: not through a single voice or moment, but through millions of refusals that deprive a regime of revenue, legitimacy, and international cover. When consent is withdrawn at scale, the architecture of impunity begins to crack.

To Aung San Suu Kyi, to every unlawfully imprisoned leader, and to the thousands held in cells, camps, and hidden detention sites across Myanmar: you are not forgotten.

No flights to a prison state.

No tourism under terror.

No business as usual while a nation is caged. Boycott travel to Myanmar until the prisoners are free, until peace is restored, and until democracy is real.

This call is issued as part of the Use Your Freedom global campaign—an invitation to turn mobility, visibility, and voice into instruments of conscience. History shows that sustained, collective refusal—across borders and cultures—can succeed where statements alone fail.

Truth calls on us to do more than ask what is happening in Myanmar. It is time to use our freedom for the people of Myanmar.

About the Authors

Alan Clements is an author, former Buddhist monk, and human rights advocate who has written extensively on authoritarianism, nonviolence, and Myanmar’s struggle for democracy. He is the author of seventeen books, including Conversation with a Dictator, Unsilenced: Aung San Suu Kyi—Conversations from a Myanmar Prison, and Politics of the Heart: Nonviolence in the Age of Atrocity. He has worked closely with Burmese democracy leaders for more than three decades, and his writing has appeared in international media across Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Fergus Harlow is a writer, scholar, and human rights advocate whose work has been integral to documenting Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement. He is the Director of the global campaign UseYourFreedom.org, which calls for the release of unlawfully imprisoned State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and all democratically elected leaders in Myanmar. He has co-authored multiple investigative works with Alan Clements grounded in primary research, direct testimony, and long-term engagement with Myanmar’s political and civil-society leaders.