Burmese President Win Myint, detained since a 2021 military coup, was yesterday freed under a mass amnesty which, according to a source close to pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, also reduced her sentence.
Win Myint and Aung San Suu Kyi, the 80-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate, led Myanmar during a decade-long experiment with civilian rule that was abruptly halted by the coup.
The president, who served from 2018, was pardoned of convictions handed down during the post-putsch period of military rule and released yesterday, a spokesman for his party said.
Photo: AFP
Aung San Suu Kyi remains detained, serving a sentence rights groups decry as a politically motivated move to hobble her National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
A source close to her legal case, requesting anonymity for security reasons, said that Aung San Suu Kyi’s 27-year sentence had been cut as part of the amnesty.
The order announced by Min Aung Hlaing — the coup leader who ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s government and was sworn in last week as civilian president — to reduce the remaining terms of all sentences under 40 years by one-sixth “also applies to her,” the source said.
Photo: Reuters
It is unclear how much of her term was considered served before the commutation order.
High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said that “all those detained unjustly since the coup — including state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi — need to be released immediately and unconditionally.”
Myo Nyunt, spokesman for the NLD, which was dissolved after the coup, said he had visited the president at his daughter’s house in the capital, Naypyidaw, and he was “in good health.”
Photo: Reuters
After five years ruling as armed forces chief, Min Aung Hlaing was installed on Friday last week as civilian leader in a transition democracy watchdogs have described as a rebranding of military rule.
The shift has been accompanied by rollbacks of some of the junta’s post-coup crackdown measures — steps the leadership tout as reconciliation, but which critics describe as cosmetic measures to aid the rebranding effort.
Min Aung Hlaing yesterday also commuted all death sentences and ordered the release of more than 4,300 prisoners in an amnesty to mark Myanmar’s new year — one of many public holidays when mass pardons are commonly made.
Outside the barbed-wire boundary of Yangon’s Insein prison, journalists saw award-winning filmmaker Shin Daewe released.
She was given a life sentence in 2024 — later commuted to 15 years — for “complicity in terrorism,” according to Reporters Without Borders, which called her initial term the “harshest” post-coup sentencing of a journalist.
“Even though I was fortunate, my unlucky friends were left behind in tears. Even as I return to my family, I am returning with tears in my eyes,” the documentarian said.
Less than 14 percent of those released in successive rounds of amnesties since the coup were political prisoners, think tank the Institute for Strategy and Policy Myanmar said late last year.
Other gaggles of families waited in the sweltering heat, hoping their relatives were among those freed.
“My brother has been imprisoned for a political case,” said 38-year-old Aung Htet Naing, who was prepared for disappointment.
“We cannot expect much, because he wasn’t included in previous pardons,” Aung Htet Naing said.
More than 30,000 people have been detained for political reasons since the coup, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said.
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