Two Reuters reporters accused of breaking Myanmar’s draconian secrecy law during their reporting of a Rohingya massacre must face trial, a judge said yesterday, in a ruling swiftly decried as a “black day” for press freedom in the nation.
Myanmar nationals Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, were arrested in December and accused of possessing leaked sensitive material linked to security operations in crisis-hit Rakhine state.
The pair, who have been held in custody for nearly seven months of pre-trial hearings, were both “charged under the state secrets act,” Judge Ye Lwin told the court in Yangon, setting a first court date for July 16.
If convicted the two could face up to 14 years in prison under the colonial-era law.
Reuters says the pair are innocent and were simply doing their job by reporting on a massacre of Rohingya Muslims in September, and has urged the court to dismiss the case.
However, Judge Ye Lwin decided the prosecution had shown enough proof that the men were “collecting evidence” from state officials to allow the case to proceed to trial.
The legal action against them has been lambasted by rights groups and foreign observers as an assault on media freedom and an effort to stifle reporting on the Rohingya crisis.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and free speech group Article 19 lambasted the ruling.
“This is a black day for press freedom in Myanmar,” said Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International’s director of crisis response, labeling the court decision “farcical” and “politically motivated.”
Article 19 said the decision underscores Myanmar’s “wide-ranging efforts to obstruct reporting on the Rakhine state crisis and to whitewash human rights violations by authorities.”
The western state has been largely sealed off from independent monitors since the crackdown started.
During pre-trial hearings the prosecution argued the reporters tried to access “secret papers” about security forces and therefore deserved punishment.
The reporters say they were entrapped by police — a version of events seemingly backed up in court by a whistleblowing cop who testified that officers were ordered to set up the reporters.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other