Hunt: I’ll help jailed Burma reporters
Foreign Secretary to raise case on visit after calling journalists’ treatment ‘a blow to press freedom’
JEREMY HUNT, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday vowed to champion the cause of two journalists jailed for their reporting of the Rohingya crisis in Burma.
He spoke out after a court in Burma jailed Reuters reporters Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, for seven years for breaching a law on state secrets while investigating the mass murder of 10 men from the Rohingya minority.
Mr Hunt added his protest to global condemnation of the ruling – the latest in a long series of human rights abuses in Burma, also known as Myanmar, to undermine the reputation of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s civilian leader and Nobel Peace laureate.
He said he would raise the case of the two journalists on a visit to Burma, and added: “Imprisoning journalists who write about inconvenient truths is an unconscionable blow to press freedom, and indeed everyone’s freedom.”
The men had denied violating the colonial-era Official Secrets Act, saying they were framed by police.
As they were led to a police van in handcuffs, Wa Lone shouted: “I have no fear. I have not done anything wrong. I believe in justice, democracy and freedom.”
Their sentencing – described as a new low for press freedom in Ms Suu Kyi’s Burma – came just one week after a UN fact-finding mission called for Burma’s generals to be prosecuted for genocide in Rakhine state, home of the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Ms Suu Kyi was singled out by the UN for failing to use her “moral authority” to stop the violence against the Rohingya, which has caused more than 700,000 to flee their homes.
Yesterday’s sentencing dealt another blow to hopes that her election to government after years of house arrest would herald an accelerated transition to full democracy from military rule.
Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief at Reuters, denounced the verdict as “a sad day for Myanmar, Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and the press everywhere,” adding that the “false charges” had been designed to “silence their reporting”.
The two journalists were arrested in December while reporting on the killings in the village of Inn Din, Rakhine state, last September. Seven Burmese soldiers have since been sentenced to hard labour for their role in “contributing and participating in murder”.
The two journalists told their trial that two police officers who they had not met before handed them papers rolled up inside a newspaper during a meeting at a restaurant in December. They were then bundled into a car by plainclothes officers.
In April, Moe Yan Naing, a police captain, testified that a senior officer had ordered his subordinates to plant secret documents on Wa Lone.