Two jailed Reuters reporters’ lawyers in Myanmar has lodged an appeal on Friday in the Supreme Court against their convictions over the charges of violating Official Secrets Act.
According to Reuters news reports, in a statement, Reuters said, “Our petition asks the Supreme Court to finally provide justice to Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, reverse the lower courts’ errors, and order the release of our journalists.”
In response to the court’s ruling, the United States vice president Mike Pence, in a Twitter post said the court’s decision was very troubling and it also showed Myanmar’s courts “failing a basic test in democracy”.
In their appeal process, the defence lawyer has cited pieces of evidence of a police set-up and also lack of evidence of a crime against reporters. They also asserted the lower court of Myanmar has wrongly placed the proofs on the defendants. The defence said prosecutors had also failed to prove that the reporters had gathered and stole secret information, and sent it to the country’s enemy or that they had any intentions to violate national security.
The Myanmar policeman, who had told the court last year about how officers plotted secret documents on jailed reporters to “entrap” them, has been released from Myanmar prison on Friday, after being one-year sentenced to jail over violating police discipline, according to Reuters news reports.
In April 2018, shortly after the court appearance, Moe Yan Naing, policeman, was sentenced to one-year jail for violating the Police Disciplinary Act. After his release, Naing told reporters, “This police disciplinary law is one of the laws we must amend while we are marching on the path towards democracy.”
He said, “This law can cause police much suffering because it is outdated.”