Suu Kyi denies any miscarriage of justice in jailing of reporters
AUNG SAN SUU KYI has defended a Burmese court decision to jail two Reuters reporters who were arrested while investigating alleged war crimes against Rohingya Muslims.
In her first public comments on a case viewed as a new low for press free- dom in Burma, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and the country’s civilian leader, denied that the seven-year sentence imposed on WA Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, had anything to do with freedom of expression.
“They were not jailed because they were journalists, they were jailed because … the court has decided that they have broken the Official Secrets Act,” she said.
She broke her silence on the issue at an international economics conference in Vietnam. She also admitted that her government could have handled the Rohingya crisis differently.
The two journalists were arrested in December while reporting on the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in the village of Inn Din last September. Seven Burmese soldiers have since been sentenced to 10 years of hard labour for their role in the crime.
The subsequent jailing of the reporters has been widely condemned by international leaders, including Jeremy Hunt, the British foreign secretary. Reuters has maintained that the two men were framed on “false charges” intended to “silence their reporting and intimidate the press”.
But Ms Suu Kyi, who was widely viewed as a human rights champion while she was held for years under house arrest by the military junta, said that the court’s judgment was based on the rule of law.
“They have every right to appeal the judgment and to point out why the judgment was wrong,” she said. “The case has been held in open court… and if anybody feels there has been a miscarriage of justice I would like them to point it out.”
Following the verdict earlier this month, Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief at Reuters, called the ruling “a major step backward” in the country’s transition to democracy.
Mike Pence, the US Vice-president, called for the release of the reporters, tweeting that they should “be commended – not imprisoned – for their work exposing human rights violations and mass killings”.
More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled western Rakhine state after government troops led a brutal crackdown last autumn.