A court controlled by the military junta in Myanmar has found the ousted Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi guilty of several allegations of corruption and sentenced him to a further seven years in prison.
These are the last judgments in a total of 19 procedures that were initiated against the 77-year-old. That said a person familiar with the process from the German Press Agency. All in all, the Nobel Peace Prize winner was sentenced to 33 years in prison for various alleged offenses, including incitement to riot. Your lawyers want to appeal.
Suu Kyi has been in solitary confinement in a prison in the capital Naypyidaw for six months after being placed under house arrest following the February 2021 military coup.
Observer: It was a show trial
The trial started in June 2021. The trials were closed to the public, and Suu Kyi’s lawyers were not allowed to speak to media representatives. Observers spoke of show trials and saw the charges as an attempt by the junta to secure its own power.
The generals justified their overthrow with alleged fraud in the November 2020 election, which Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party had clearly won. They presented no evidence. Since then, the former Burma has descended into chaos and violence.
The junta is trying to use all its might to suppress popular resistance. Again and again she acts brutally against opponents. According to the prisoner aid organization AAPP, more than 2,600 people have been killed and more than 16,600 arrested since the coup.
The trials against Suu Kyi are also condemned internationally as politically motivated. Suu Kyi had already spent around 15 years under house arrest between 1989 and 2010. She was at the forefront of the democracy movement, which rebelled against the military, which had been in power since 1962. She was released in 2010 and led her party to power in elections five years later. At the beginning of 2021, the military staged a coup.