Restoring Internet Access to the Rohingya Refugee Camps of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh

Cox's Bazar hosts close to one million Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar from 2017 onward, widely described as the world's largest refugee settlement.

Citing security concerns after refugees used mobile phones to help organise a large gathering on 25 August 2019 marking the anniversary of their exodus, Bangladeshi authorities cut mobile internet access across the camps on 3 September 2019 — a restriction Human Rights Watch documented as endangering refugees by blocking access to safety information, family contact and services.

Following sustained advocacy from UN agencies, local and international NGOs, and public appeals from Bangladeshi civil-society activists — intensified by the need to share COVID-19 prevention information — the government restored 3G and 4G mobile internet access in the camps on 28 August 2020, as reported independently by BenarNews, Radio Free Asia and Dhaka Tribune.

Restoration reopened channels for humanitarian agencies to disseminate public-health information and gave children renewed access to distance-education programming that had been disrupted both by the ban and by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cox's Bazar is now also a focus location within the broader 2023-launched UNHCR–ITU–GSMA 'Connectivity for Refugees' partnership (with the Governments of Luxembourg and Spain), which aims to deliver affordable, meaningful connectivity to 20 million forcibly displaced people worldwide by 2030.

Caution: this is fundamentally a cautionary case. Connectivity was a government-granted, government-revocable privilege rather than a guaranteed right — refugee digital access was suspended for a full year over security concerns, and no explicit domestic legal guarantee against a future shutdown was identified in public reporting.

Read the full analysis: https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/bengali/internet-restored-08282020174831.html