Myanmar SC rejects Suu Kyi appeal

MYANMAR: Myanmar’s Supreme Court on Friday rejected an appeal by Aung San Suu Kyi against her extended house arrest, her lawyer said, keeping her in detention ahead of elections promised by the junta this year.

The 64-year-old opposition leader had her incarceration lengthened by 18 months in August after being convicted over a bizarre incident in which an American man swam to her lakeside home in Yangon.

Her legal team immediately vowed to lodge a fresh appeal with Myanmar’s chief justice, the last avenue available to them for challenging her detention. Suu Kyi was not in court to hear Friday’s verdict.

“The appeal was rejected. We do not know the reason,” Nyan Win, her lawyer and the spokesman for her National League for Democracy (NLD), said outside the court.

“We will go for a fresh appeal,” he added.

A Myanmar official confirmed that the court had rejected the appeal, as well as those of Suu Kyi’s two female live-in assistants against similar periods of detention.

Foreign ambassadors including the British, French and Australian envoys went to the court to hear the verdict.

“The court rejected the appeal, it came as no surprise to us,” French ambassador Jean-Pierre Lafosse said. “She should be released immediately as one of the conditions for real national reconciliation.”

A lower court threw out an initial appeal against her house arrest in October.

Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi has already spent 14 of the past 20 years in jail or under house arrest since the country’s last elections in 1990, which the NLD won by a landslide.

Myanmar’s ruling junta then prevented the party from taking power. YANGON, Friday, AFP