The Supreme Court in Burma (Myanmar) will hear an appeal lodged by detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi against her house arrest next week, one of her lawyers said today.
The appeal by Ms Suu Kyi, the figurehead of the fight against military rule in the Southeast Asian country, will be heard in the capital Naypyitaw on October 29th by a panel of five judges, lawyer Kyi Win said.
Ms Suu Kyi is due to be released on November 13th, six days after the country's first election in two decades.
She was sentenced to house arrest in August last year for allowing an American intruder to stay at her home in contravention of security rules. The intruder, John Yettaw, said God had sent him to warn her she would be the target of an assassination plot.
Speculation has been rife that the regime, rather than honour a pledge to release her, would find another reason to detain her in November to ensure a smooth transition for the government that will emerge from the election.
Ms Suu Kyi, daughter of the leader of the former Burma's campaign for independence from British rule, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, a year after her party swept Burma's last parliamentary election. The military ignored the result. She has spent 15 of the past 21 years in detention, most of it under house arrest in Yangon.
Meanwhile, the ruling military junta changed the country's flag, national anthem and official name today. The changes were outlined in a new constitution published in 2008 but the government had not announced a date for their introduction.
The country's official new name is the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, instead of the Union of Myanmar.
The military, which has ruled since a 1962 coup, changed the country's name in English from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after widespread protests against military rule were crushed.
The new flag has a horizontal band of light green at the top, dark green in the centre and red at the bottom, with a white star in the middle. There has been no official explanation as to what the colours or the star represent. Nor has there been any explanation as to why the changes, which include a new state seal, were being made.
Officials in various government departments said they were ordered to change the flags. "We were caught by surprise when we got the order at short notice. There was also an order that the old flags must be burnt," said one official who declined to be identified.
The order stipulated that the old flag had to be lowered by someone born on a Tuesday and the new flag had to be raised by someone born on a Wednesday, he said. "It must have been instructed by astrologers," he said.
The junta’s secretive military rulers, who will retain ultimate power no matter who wins the parliamentary election on November 7th, are widely believed to consult astrologers.
Reuters