On Monday (3/9), Reuters reported, a Myanmar judge found two of Reuters journalists guilty of breaching a law on state secrets and jailed them for seven years.
Yangon northern district judge Ye Lwin said Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, breached the colonial-era Official Secrets Act when they collected and obtained confidential documents.
The trial
“The defendants ... have breached Official Secrets Act section 3.1.c, and are sentenced to seven years,” the judge said, adding that the time served since they were detained on Dec. 12 would be taken into account. The defense can appeal the decision to a regional court and then the supreme court.
Time posted that the arrest of Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, has been widely viewed as retribution for their reporting on the massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslim men found in a mass grave in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, and their conviction deals a serious blow to press freedom in the country.
The pair has been detained since their arrest on Dec. 12, 2017, when they were accused of obtaining classified documents and charged under a draconian if seldom-applied, colonial-era Official Secrets Act. Facing a maximum penalty of up to 14 years, each was sentenced to seven years with hard labour, minus time served.
When Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were apprehended, they were investigating a massacre at Inn Dinn village in Rakhine state, where they had uncovered evidence linking state security forces to the killings. Their report, published more than a month after their arrest, included photographic evidence that appeared to show Security Police Battalion 8 present at an execution.
A setup case
Time reported that during the hour-long verdict, judge Ye Lwin maintained the journalists had “not acted as ordinary reporters,” but instead had intended to “damage the security of the country.”
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have insisted from the outset that they were caught up in a bizarre plot that involved police inviting them to dinner and handing them the very documents that served as the pretext for their arrest.
The contradictions only multiplied as the trial was hit with conflicting testimony, a prosecuting witness who forgot key details and a police captain who told the court he had been ordered to entrap the journalists. The captain was later sentenced to a year in prison, and his family evicted from police living quarters.
“From the start, this case has been a set-up meant to suppress their reporting,” says Shawn Crispin, senior Southeast Asia representative at the Committee to Protect Journalists.
No freedom in Myanmar
“By imprisoning reporters for doing their job, the Government of Myanmar is taking the dead-end path of trying to suppress facts and avoid accountability for its own actions,” said Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights.
Myanmar is rated Partly Free in Freedom in the World 2018, Not Free in Freedom of the Press 2017, and Not Free in Freedom on the Net 2017.
“I have no fear,” he yelled out, his hands still in shackles. “No one can make me fearful because I never did anything wrong.”
Source: Time, Reuters, Freedom House