Burma justices to rule on appeal of convicted Reuters journalists

NAYPYITAW, Burma — Burma’s Supreme Court is to rule today on the appeal of two Reuters journalists who were sentenced to seven years in prison for their reporting on the military’s brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo and their colleagues were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, one of journalism’s highest honors, earlier this month.

They were arrested in December 2017 and sentenced last September to seven years’ imprisonment after being accused of illegally possessing official documents, a violation of the colonial-era Official Secrets Act.

They denied the allegation and contended they were framed by police. International rights groups, media freedom organizations, U.N experts and several governments including the United States condemned their conviction as an injustice and an attack on freedom of the press.

Their appeal in January to a lower court was rejected on the ground that the lawyers for Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, failed to submit enough evidence to prove they were innocent.

Khin Maung Zaw, a lawyer for the two, has said the latest appeal argues that lower court rulings involved errors in judicial procedure.

The Burmese army’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the western state of Rakhine in response to attacks on security personnel in 2017 drove 700,000 members of the Muslim Rohingya minority to flee to Bangladesh.

Reporting on the crackdown is sensitive in Buddhist-dominated Burma because of worldwide condemnation of the military’s human-rights abuses, which it denies.

The two reporters had worked on an investigation of the killing of 10 Rohingya villagers in Inn Din village, for which the government last year said seven soldiers were sentenced to up 10 years in prison with hard labor.

Investigators working for the U.N.’s top human-rights body said last year that genocide charges should be brought against senior Burmese military officers, while other critics accused the army of ethnic cleansing.

Prosecution witnesses at the reporters’ trial gave confusing and conflicting testimony, lending weight to the belief that the arrests were a clumsy setup by the government.