Prominent human rights lawyer Amal Clooney appealed to Aung San Suu Kyi on Friday, 28 September over a pardon for two Reuters journalists imprisoned in Myanmar, saying the Nobel laureate held the key to their release.
The two journalists, accused of breaching Myanmar’s state secrets law while reporting on a massacre of Rohingya Muslims, were jailed for seven years earlier this month, sparking international outrage.
Clooney said the journalists’ families had already submitted a request for their pardon, adding that the president can grant a pardon following consultation with Suu Kyi.
“The government can, if it wants to, end it today,” the British-Lebanese lawyer told an event dedicated to press freedom on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
“She knows that mass murder is not a state secret and that exposing it doesn't turn a journalist into a spy,” Clooney said.
Earlier this month, Suu Kyi defended the jailing of Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, hitting back at global criticism of a trial widely seen as an attempt to muzzle the free press.
“She holds the key, the key to their liberty, the key to reuniting them with their young children, the key to freedom of the press,” Amal said.
“The key to truth and accountability, and the key to a more democratic and prosperous Myanmar,” Clooney said. “History will judge her on her response.”
Clooney recalled that when she was a student at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the Nobel peace laureate, who studied at the same college 30 years earlier, had been “a hero to me.”
“Aung Sang Suu Kyi knows better than anyone what it is like to be a political prisoner in Myanmar. She has slept in a cell at the prison where Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo now sleep,” she said.
Suu Kyi, once garlanded as a global rights champion, has come under intense pressure to use her moral authority inside Myanmar to press for a presidential pardon for the reporters.
The case, which sparked an international outcry, was seen as an attempt to muzzle reporting on last year's crackdown by Myanmar's security forces on the Muslim Rohingya minority in Rakhine state.
Army-led “clearance operations” drove 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh, carrying with them widespread accounts of atrocities – rape, murder and arson – by Myanmar police and troops.
The reporters say they were set up while exposing the extrajudicial killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims in a Rakhine village last year.
(Published in an arrangement with the Associated Press)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)