Home -> Law Blog Directory -> International Law Blogs -> prisonlawinsideout

International Law

: prisonlawinsideout

Blogger jailed for 20 years in Burma

By John Hirst

Blogger jailed for 20 years in Burma

Burma has jailed a blogger for 20 years and handed down even longer sentences to other activists who criticised the regime.

Nay Phone Latt, 28, was among five pro-democracy activists jailed on Monday. A former member of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party, he was sentenced along with a poet, Saw Wai, who is accused of penning a secret anti-junta message in one of his works.

Military censors in Burma - also known as Myanmar - launched an investigation in January after a poem by Saw Wai appeared in a newspaper. The work read like a love letter, but the first character in each word spelt "Senior General Than Shwe is power crazy".

Fourteen Burmese democracy activists have meanwhile been handed 65 year jail terms in Rangoon.

Full post as published by prisonlawinsideout on November 11, 2008 (boomark / email).