YANGON, Oct 29, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - International media will be allowed to cover Myanmar's upcoming junta-run polls, election authorities said Wednesday, an apparent invitation for foreign press to scrutinise the deeply disputed vote.

Myanmar's junta has "shattered the media landscape" with censorship and intimidation since staging a 2021 coup that sparked a civil war, Reporters Without Borders says.

Local journalists bore the brunt of the crackdown while foreign media quit the country en masse, with AFP the only international news agency maintaining a full in-country bureau.

The junta has touted polls starting December 28 as a path to peace, but the vote will be boycotted in rebel-held enclaves and monitors are dismissing it as a ploy to disguise continuing military rule.

The junta-stacked Union Election Commission said in a statement "both local and international news media will be allowed to cover" the election, due to unfold in phases over a matter of weeks.

The junta-run information ministry "will scrutinize and endorse eligible international media organizations", said the notice in state newspaper The Global New Light of Myanmar.

It is not clear what that process will entail and which media outlets will be approved for access to a country which has been largely cut-off by the military coup.

Myanmar's media landscape blossomed during its decade-long democratic thaw, with new domestic outlets springing up and foreign journalists rushing in.

Since the military took back power many of those outlets have shut, moved to rebel-held areas or operate from exile in neighbouring Thailand.

Myanmar ranked third among the world's leading jailers of journalists in 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Rights groups have said the election cannot be legitimate with democratic figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi deposed and jailed in the coup, and her vastly popular National League for Democracy party dissolved.

Protesting against the poll has been made punishable by up to a decade in prison.

Diplomatic sources have told AFP the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will not send election observers for the vote.

Numerous rights groups lobbied the 11-nation bloc to hold back monitors, lest they lend legitimacy to a vote which they say will be neither free nor fair.