Prominent human rights lawyer Amal Clooney appealed to Aung San Suu Kyi on Friday over a pardon for two Reuters journalists imprisoned in Myanmar, saying the Nobel laureate held the key to their release.
The two fathers, accused of breaching Myanmar’s state secrets law while reporting on a massacre of Rohingya Muslims, were jailed for seven years earlier this month, fueling 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 held de facto leader Suu Kyi to her stated priority of releasing prisoners of conscience and of having spoken of the need for a free press if the country is to transition to a full democracy.
“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.
“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.