Myanmar’s newly elected president has commuted former leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s sentence by an additional one-sixth as part of an amnesty deal, her legal team said on Thursday.
The second such reduction in two weeks comes after an announcement by the state media that all prisoners would have their sentences commuted.
A member of her legal team said Suu Kyi still faces 18 years in prison – a lengthy jail term for the octogenarian who faces a number of health issues.
Suu Kyi, 80, has been held in jail since her government was overthrown in a 2021 military coup. She had originally been sentenced to 33 years on a raft of charges widely dismissed as politically motivated. The sentence was later commuted to 27 years.
The future of the Nobel Peace laureate remains uncertain as it was expected that she would be moved to house arrest after a mass amnesty was granted on the New Year’s to thousands of prisoners. Ousted president Win Myint was released as part of that amnesty.
Win, who was one of hundreds of members of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party, was arrested at the time of the coup.
At that time, her 27-year sentence was commuted by a sixth as part of a traditional New Year’s amnesty. Suu Kyi’s whereabouts are unknown and she has not been seen in public since the marathon trials.
Authorities continue to hold her at an undisclosed location, and the government has yet to grant her legal team or family face-to-face access.
The decision comes as coup leader Min Aung Hlaing was recently chosen as president by parliament, formalising his grip on power after an election criticised by the West as sham because it was dominated by an army-backed party in the absence of viable opposition.
The coup by former military chief Hlaing ended a decade of tentative democracy and sparked chaos and a civil war in the country.
As state counsellor, Suu Kyi led Myanmar from 2016 to 2021, sparking brief hope for democratic reform in the country. She was among the first members of her government to be arrested by the military on 1 February 2021 and is now one of thousands of political prisoners in the country. Her journey is documented in a film released by The Independent entitled Cancelled: The rise and fall of Aung San Suu Kyi.
