Suu Kyi’s law team prepares final arguments
Lawyers for Aung San Suu Kyi, the detained Burmese opposition leader, expect to make their closing arguments in her trial on Monday, with the verdict to be announced shortly afterwards.
Yesterday Kyi Win, a jur-ist and member of Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, argued that the charges against her had been mistakenly applied. He was the only one of the four defence witnesses proposed by Ms Suu Kyi’s team that the court allowed to take the stand.
Ms Suu Kyi is charged with breaking the terms of her house arrest by allowing an American, John Yettaw, to stay the night without reporting him to the authorities. Mr Yettaw used a pair of home-made flippers to swim uninvited to her lakeside house this month.
Ms Suu Kyi, 63, is fighting the charges, which carry a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment.
She told the court she gave Mr Yettaw “temporary shelter” because he was exhausted and hungryand she did not want to create trouble for him or for the security guard of her house.
Mr Yettaw, a veteran of the Vietnam war who lives in Falcon, Missouri, is also on trial for breaking immigration and national security laws. He seems to have had confused motives for his quixotic mission.
“He said the reason he came was in his vision he saw that Aung San Suu Kyi was assassinated by terrorists . . . he came here to warn [her] and also the government,” said Nyan Win, one of Ms Suu Kyi’s legal team. f he is convicted, Mr Yettaw could be sentenced to up to seven years in prison.
Ms Suu Kyi’s trial has been widely criticised: the US called it “outrageous”, Britain’s Gordon Brown said he was “deeply troubled”, and a long list of Nobel laureates and human rights activists have united to demand Ms Suu Kyi’s unconditional release.
Countries that have traditionally been reluctant to be critical of the Burmese government, many of them Asian neighbours, have joined in the criticism.
The Association of South East Asian Nations, an influential regional grouping of which Burma is a member, has voiced rare concern, provoking a sharp reaction from the Burmese authorities.
“It is not political, it is not a human rights issue. So we don’t accept pressure and interference from abroad,” Maung Mynt, Burma’s deputy foreign minister, told ministers on Thursday.
Diplomats say that even China, Burma’s biggest trading partner and most influential ally, is privately unhappy with the government’s decision to put Ms Suu Kyi on trial, although in public it is holding fast to its policy of non-intervention.
FT
