Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and her US co-defendant are to appeal against their convictions, lawyers said yesterday as the ruling junta faced a global wave of anger over her extended detention.
US President Barack Obama led worldwide outrage at the military regime’s decision on Tuesday to give Suu Kyi another 18 months of house arrest, a verdict that shuts the Nobel peace laureate out of elections next year.
The UN Security Council broke up an emergency meeting with no condemnation of Myanmar and China urged respect for the country’s sovereignty, but Myanmar’s Southeast Asian neighbors issued a rare expression of disappointment.
PHOTO: AFP
In Yangon, Suu Kyi’s lawyer Nyan Win said her legal team would appeal because they were “not satisfied” with the judgment, which stemmed from a stunt in which an American, John Yettaw, swam to her lakeside house in May.
A prison court sentenced her to three years of hard labor after finding her guilty of breaching the terms of her incarceration, but junta strongman Than Shwe commuted the punishment to a year and a half under house arrest.
“We assume that the judgment is totally wrong according to the law,” Nyan Win said, adding that he had received approval from Suu Kyi to proceed if they received a copy of the judgment.
Police and security forces blocked off the road outside her house yesterday.
Lawyers for Yettaw, who was sentenced to seven years of hard labor and imprisonment, would appeal “step by step” to the Myanmar court system and, if necessary, urge Than Shwe to deport him, lawyer Khin Maung Oo said.
He said Yettaw was “very calm” and “hopes for the best.”
In related news, Indonesia said yesterday it had shut down a meeting of exiled Myanmar opposition groups in a move that the activists blamed on pressure from the military junta in Yangon.
The self-proclaimed government-in-exile and six pro-democracy alliances were due to hold two days of talks in Jakarta to spearhead a democracy transition plan for the military-ruled country.
Organizers said their meeting had been curtailed because of “restrictions by police” and intervention from Yangon.
“Regional politics or ASEAN internal politics [are] as usual taking place ... We are very disappointed,” Bo Hla Tint, foreign affairs minister for the exiled National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, said in an e-mail.
Foreign ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah confirmed that Jakarta had disallowed the meeting despite being aware of “international disappointment” over the situation in Myanmar.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema