An award-winning Canadian-American photographer appears to have been denied entry into Myanmar as his name was included on a “blacklist”.





Documentary photographer Greg Constantine told AFP that he was stopped at the Yangon Airport on November 11 and told that he was on a “blacklist”.

Mr Constantine believed the move was linked to his work documenting the lives of the Muslim minority who self-identify as Rohingya.

“I’ve done a significant amount of work on stateless people in Rakhine ... I can only speculate that that would be the reason, or one of the reasons, why I would be on this blacklist right now,” Mr Constantine said to AFP.

He had been en route to an exhibition of his work at a gallery in Yangon, but the opening of the show, Nowhere people, was delayed after Mr Constantine was denied entry. The exhibition included pictures of Rohingya IDPs in camps in Rakhine State.

U Ye Tun Oo, director of the immigration department confirmed Mr Constantine’s blacklisting to AFP, but declined to provide further information, including what kind of blacklist the photographer was on, or the grounds for his inclusion on the list.

Mr Constantine did not return The Myanmar Times’ request for comment.

The Myanmar government has been in the process of removing names from a lengthy blacklist kept by the former administration. In August, the Minister for Labour, Immigration and Population revealed that over 4300 people, mostly foreigners, had been included on the catalogue under the U Thein Sein government.





A total of 619 people – 248 Myanmar citizens and 371 foreigners – have been removed from the no-entry list as the National League for Democracy began assisting in the return of political exiles in June.

The long list of undesirables was composed by successive military regimes, which forced many citizens into exile, primarily in the United States, Australia or Europe. The government of U Thein Sein scrubbed nearly 2000 names from the blacklist in 2012, including politicians, foreign journalists, pro-democracy activists and armed group leaders.