Left Behind

Episode #512: “The overall consequences are so bad that I myself urged the Norwegian government to stop some of this.”

Hanne Sophie Greve, a Norwegian judge and long-time human rights jurist, argues that Telenor’s conduct in Myanmar created foreseeable and preventable pathways to severe human rights harm, but existing legal systems struggle to respond proportionately. She frames the case as both a corporate failure and a test of how Norway—a state that portrays itself as committed to democracy and human rights—handles the risks created when a majority state-owned company operates in a fragile political environment.

Greve reconstructs Telenor’s entry into Myanmar during a period of political opening, when optimism about liberalization was widespread. She notes that Telenor had a strong reputation for transparency and human-rights due diligence, which she describes as a tool designed to identify high-risk contexts.

Precisely because of that due diligence, Greve identifies the company’s first major failure: Myanmar’s telecommunications sector was structurally high-risk even during the democratic transition, because the legal system lacked safeguards, and Telenor knew this. She argues that the company should have insisted on legal protections and planned for an emergency exit. When political conditions deteriorated and sanctions reinforced those risks, Telenor still failed to act on what it knew. The second failure was Telenor’s handling of real-time interception equipment. Although lawful when imported, Telenor kept it in Myanmar after sanctions were imposed and was later operationalized by the military. She emphasizes that leaving such capacity behind in a country sliding toward authoritarian violence is not a neutral act. She also strongly criticizes Telenor’s exit and sale of its Myanmar operation to a military-linked entity, arguing that sensitive data should have been deleted rather than left accessible.

Greve describes the situation in present-day Myanmar as a constant conflict in which surveillance enables arrests, repression, and lethal violence. While she says Telenor’s criminal liability under Norwegian law remains legally uncertain, she argues that if responsibility is established it would attach to the company itself, not individual employees. She concludes by treating the case as a warning about how control over communications infrastructure directly affects whether a society can function at all, and she expresses hope that Norway can support a peaceful transition for Myanmar’s people. “I would love to see my own country in Norway participating in bringing about that peaceful transition for the benefit of the people of Myanmar.”