> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.traceoriginresearch.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What a Knowledge Graph Found in 31,824 Myanmar Detention Records: A Civilian Legal System Being Replaced by a Military One - URL: https://www.traceoriginresearch.com/what-a-knowledge-graph-found-in-31-824-myanmar-detention-records-a-civilian-legal-system-being-replaced-by-a-military-one/ - Published: 2026-08-26T05:58:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-28T17:02:26.000Z - Author: Eric Brattin - Tags: Southeast Asia Eric Brattin Report · Aug 2026 · 31,824 detentions (AAPP) A report from the record · Myanmar political detentions # Two systems. One is *replacing* the other. On February 1, 2021, the Tatmadaw seized power and began arresting elected officials, journalists, and civil society leaders under Penal Code Section 505A, a colonial-era provision criminalizing "fake news." Within a year, the junta had shifted its primary instrument to the Counter-Terrorism Law, a 2014 statute whose charges are adjudicated not in civilian courts but in military tribunals without due-process guarantees. That shift is not a matter of emphasis. It is a structural transformation of the legal architecture of repression, visible in the charge co-occurrence data and measurable by permutation test. By 2025, 68.5% of political prosecutions involved Counter-Terrorism Law charges, up from 28.1% in 2021\. The civilian Penal Code, which accounted for 62.8% of charges in the first year of the coup, had collapsed to 14.1%. The junta built its repressive apparatus in real time, and the data shows exactly when each piece was added. We read 31,824 detention records from AAPP's political prisoner database, covering 19,972 cases with charge information across 738 distinct legal provisions. What the data reveals is a bifurcation: two legal systems running in parallel, with the military system progressively displacing the civilian one. Under international law, this matters because it compounds the violation. The civilian charges (S:505A) violate ICCPR Article 19 (expression). The military charges (CTL S:52-a) violate both Article 9 (arbitrary detention) and Article 14 (fair trial), because military tribunals lack the independence, impartiality, and procedural safeguards that Article 14 requires. The pivot from civilian to military prosecution is a pivot from one category of violation to two. Analysis E. Brattin Source data AAPP (Myanmar) Method Formal ontology + permutation testing + Louvain community detection Period 2021 to 2026 31,824 Political detentions 9,029 Charged under facially incompatible statutes 11,373 Fair-trial violations (military tribunals) 68.5% Counter-Terrorism Law share by 2025 The finding ## A civilian production line and a military *stacking machine.* Louvain community detection finds 13 communities in the charge co-occurrence graph, but two clusters dominate: a civilian speech cluster (Penal Code S:505A, 8,014 cases) and a counter-terrorism cluster (CTL S:52-a, 5,996 cases). The two clusters behave differently. The civilian charge is a production-line instrument: standalone in 73.5% of cases, structurally identical to Russia's Art. 207.3 (74.5%) and Belarus's Art. 342 (79.9%). The military charge is a bundling instrument: standalone in only 47.1% of cases, stacked with CTL S:50-j, S:51-c, and S:50-i to compound sentences. Cuba stacks its civilian charges. Myanmar stacks its military ones. The stacking follows the tribunal. System 1 · Civilian Penal Code The colonial production line Penal Code Section 505A criminalizes "fake news" and statements causing "fear" or "agitating" against the government. Inherited from the Indian Penal Code (1860), it is a colonial-era provision that India itself has moved to reform. Applied as a standalone single-charge prosecution in 73.5% of cases: the same factory model Russia and Belarus use for their primary speech offenses. S: 505AS: 505S: 505(b)S: 124-AS: 145 S: 505A standalone in **5,889/8,014** cases (**73.5%**). Declining share: **62.8%** of prosecutions in 2021, **14.1%** by 2026. System 2 · Counter-Terrorism Law The military tribunal stacking machine The Counter-Terrorism Law (2014) was enacted before the coup but became the primary repressive instrument after February 2021\. Its charges are adjudicated in military tribunals without civilian due-process guarantees. Unlike the civilian production line, CTL charges stack: S:52-a (financing terrorism) is standalone in only 47.1% of cases, typically bundled with S:50-j (association), S:51-c (harboring), and S:50-i (providing materials). S: 52-aS: 50-jS: 51-cS: 50-iS: 50-aS: 54 S: 52-a standalone in **2,826/5,996** cases (**47.1%**). Rising share: **28.1%** of prosecutions in 2021, **68.5%** by 2025. > Cuba stacks civilian charges. Russia simplifies them. Belarus grinds them flat. Myanmar stacks military charges while running a civilian production line in parallel. The fourth pattern: bifurcation. The pivot ## The junta abandoned the civilian legal system in *real time.* The temporal data tells a precise story. In 2021 (first full year of the coup), 62.8% of political prosecutions used Penal Code speech charges and 28.1% used Counter-Terrorism Law. By 2023, CTL had overtaken the Penal Code: 70.6% versus 27.1%. By 2025, the civilian system had collapsed to 16.1% and CTL dominated at 68.5%. The structural breaks are at 2022 (p=0.003) and 2023 (p=0.003). The 2024 break is not significant (p=0.655): the new architecture was in place. Speech vs Counter-Terrorism share and prosecution volume · 2021 to 2025 Unlike Russia, where the repressive apparatus was built before the crisis (structural breaks at 2017 and 2019, not the 2022 invasion), Myanmar's junta built its apparatus in real time. The first year of the coup used available civilian tools (Penal Code 505A). By the second year, the military had pivoted to its own legal framework (Counter-Terrorism Law). By the third year, the pivot was complete. The structural breaks track the construction schedule, not external events. The colonial inheritance ## The laws the British wrote to suppress independence are prosecuting *democracy.* The Penal Code (1860), the Unlawful Associations Act (1908), the Arms Act (1878), and the Explosive Substances Act (1908) are all colonial-era legislation still in force. India repealed its identical sedition provision (Section 124-A) in 2023\. Myanmar's junta is prosecuting dissidents under laws the British wrote to suppress the independence movement that created the state the junta now rules. The SKOS vocabulary maps each of these provisions to the ICCPR articles they violate, making the colonial legal inheritance ICCPR-queryable for the first time. > The SPARQL query returns 11,373 prosecutions violating Article 14 (fair trial). That number is impossible without the ontology. The CSV knows charges. The SKOS knows which rights each charge violates. The A-Box connects persons to persecutions to charges. SPARQL crosses all three. That is why you build a knowledge graph. What follows ## If the argument holds, three things become *possible.* Consequence 1 · For the Independent Investigative Mechanism The bifurcation is structural evidence that military tribunals are the intended venue for political prosecution. The IIMM (established by HRC resolution 39/2) collects evidence for future accountability proceedings. The charge co-occurrence data shows that the shift from civilian courts to military tribunals was deliberate, measurable, and completed within three years. The pivot from Article 19 violations (expression) to Article 14 violations (fair trial) is not incidental. It is the structural consequence of moving prosecutions from courts where judges have nominal independence to tribunals where the military commands the process. Consequence 2 · For the four-country comparative framework Myanmar proves the methodology works outside the European legal tradition. Cuba (Latin American Penal Code), Russia (post-Soviet Criminal Code), Belarus (post-Soviet Criminal Code), and Myanmar (British colonial Penal Code + military Counter-Terrorism Law). Four legal traditions, three continents, four structurally distinct patterns found by the same unsupervised algorithm. A technique that finds different structures in four datasets from four legal traditions is not overfitting. It is measuring something real about how states prosecute dissent. Consequence 3 · For ICCPR reporting The SPARQL query that returns 11,373 Article 14 violations is a submission-ready finding. Myanmar acceded to the ICCPR in 2017\. The Human Rights Committee can receive state reports and individual communications. The merged knowledge graph (386,648 triples) makes every detention record queryable by the ICCPR article violated. The count of 9,029 persons charged under facially incompatible statutes and 11,373 prosecutions violating Article 14 fair-trial guarantees are not estimates. They are exact counts derived from the state's own charging data, reproducible by running a SPARQL query against the published ontology. Method note · What we actually did We took 31,824 detention records from AAPP's public S3 data files (arrestedPeople.json, arrestedPeople\_remaining.json) and normalized the charge data (738 distinct charges after mapping bare section numbers to their law-prefixed forms). The pipeline builds a BFO-aligned OWL ontology (386,648 triples), a SKOS charge vocabulary with 29 annotated provisions mapping to ICCPR articles, a charge co-occurrence graph (213 nodes, 628 edges), and Louvain community detection with permutation-tested structural breaks. This is the fourth analysis in the comparative series. Cuba ([published](https://www.traceoriginresearch.com/what-a-knowledge-graph-found-in-1-172-cuban-charge-sheets-that-no-case-file-could-show-alone/)), Russia ([published](https://www.traceoriginresearch.com/what-a-knowledge-graph-found-in-7-111-russian-prosecution-records-that-no-single-case-file-could-show/)), Belarus ([published](https://www.traceoriginresearch.com/what-a-knowledge-graph-found-in-3-829-belarusian-charge-sheets-that-no-single-case-file-could-show/)). The complete codebase is open on [GitHub](https://github.com/TruthQuest/myanmar-charge-graph?ref=traceoriginresearch.com). AAPP documented 31,824 political detentions. The junta prosecuted the first 13,149 of them under a law the British wrote in 1860\. Then it switched to a law it wrote itself in 2014 and moved the proceedings to military tribunals where acquittals do not happen. The charge co-occurrence data shows exactly when the switch occurred (2022), how complete it became (68.5% by 2025), and what it means under international law (a compound violation of Articles 9, 14, and 19 of the ICCPR, applied to 19,972 people with charge data, in a state that acceded to the Covenant in 2017). The ontology does not open the cell. It writes down what the state has done, in a form the state cannot revise, in a language other institutions can read. That is not a remedy. It is a precondition for one. Trace Origin LLC Structural intelligence for investigations. Four-country comparative framework: Cuba, Russia, Belarus, Myanmar. #### Source [AAPP](https://coup.aappb.org/?ref=traceoriginresearch.com) Assistance Association for Political Prisoners #### Contact [ebrattin@traceoriginresearch.com](mailto:ebrattin@traceoriginresearch.com) [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericbrattin?ref=traceoriginresearch.com) [GitHub](https://github.com/TruthQuest/myanmar-charge-graph?ref=traceoriginresearch.com) © 2026 Trace Origin LLC · All rights reserved · Non-commercial academic citation and journalistic quotation permitted under standard fair use.